Chorus. Long History, so my memory may be a little vague. Started out as a French university and government research project (similar roots to MachOS from CarnegieMellon). Extremely geared towards a "distributed computing environment." Heavily backed by French government and by large French conglomerates (Alcatel, Thomson, etc). Then they signed an agreement with ATT (who had acquired Unix System labs) to support a Unix API on top of the Chorus kernel. Way back in 1992, when Microsoft was trying to adress the growth in Unix, by defining Windows NT, some ideas were thrown around on using chorus as the kernel and having SystemV API running. There was even an agreement announced between SCG (now ISI) who did the pSOS kernel, to tie up with Chorus for a new OS they called "Aria". the idea was to wrap the Chorus SystemV APIs around the pSOS kernel.
Years later (1998) Sun was shopping for an embedded OS. Alot was going on, for example the Larry Ellison drive for the Network computer, and the whole ides of "thin Clients". Sun was also backing (I think) a company caled "PowerTV" or something like taht for set top boxes. I hear they looked at buying Lynx real time Systems, who makes the LynxOS. The reasons are obvious: LynxOS supports Unix APIs, so would be a great complement to Sun's Solaris. For whatever reason, the Lynx / Sun deal didn't hapen. Instead, Sun bought Chorus. They started out by treating it as an "independant" entity, but most people speculate that they are trying to jump start their embedded expertise by taking advantage of Chorus' people & knowledge. Further, I would guess that they are trying to use this as a basis for porting the Java VM onto the ChorusOS.
My personal opinion: Sun may have wasted their money. I have heard numerous times that the Chorus code was flaky and unstable, mostly R&D level of completion, not productised. The Chorus OS seems to suffer from a lack of an integrated development environment. If Sun would have bought Lynx, that would have been a VERY interesting story. By the way, the chief architect of the LynxOS is Mitch Bunnel, who is a genus, inmho. He also knows the embedded and hard-real-time isues associated with Java very well.
If anybody on the SI Wind thread knows other or else on Chorus, please feel free to add to this.
cheers! |
