| 89 | | HelenOS, on the other hand, is a multiserver environment which does not reimplement any legacy system. It has its own microkernel called SPARTAN. Besides ia32, it also supports amd64, arm32, ia64, mips32, ppc32, sparc32 and sparc64 to varying degrees, some of them in multiprocessor configurations. An overwhelming majority of HelenOS components such as file systems, networking stack, device drivers and GUI have been written specifically for HelenOS, so there is virtually no bloat introduced by various compatibility and glue layers, neither there is any additional maintenance burden associated with maintaining aging third-party components. The networking stack is decomposed into several processes, each implementing part of the stack such as IP, TCP or UDP. Essentially all HelenOS drivers run in user mode, the exception being kernel drivers used for debugging purposes and the timer and interrupt controller drivers. HelenOS supports both USB and sound (Sound Blaster 16 and Intel HDA). HelenOS is a single user operating system, even though there has been some experimental work done on multiuser support. HelenOS does not have a direct analogy to the translator mechanism, but the system configuration can be dynamically changed by spawning/killing user space servers that implement certain IPC protocols and by stacking services on top of each other. HelenOS currently does not support very many user applications as the development focus is on subsystems, frameworks and drivers. A very limited support exists for running a few standard development tools inside HelenOS (e.g. binutils, gcc, python and some others). See also the following question. |
| | 89 | HelenOS, on the other hand, is a multiserver environment which does not reimplement any legacy system. It has its own microkernel called SPARTAN. Besides ia32, it also supports amd64, arm32, ia64, mips32, ppc32, sparc32 and sparc64 to varying degrees, some of them in multiprocessor configurations. An overwhelming majority of HelenOS components such as file systems, networking stack, device drivers and GUI have been written specifically for HelenOS, so there is virtually no bloat introduced by various compatibility layers and glue code, neither there is any additional maintenance burden associated with maintaining aging third-party components. The networking stack is decomposed into several processes, each implementing part of the stack such as IP, TCP or UDP. Essentially all HelenOS drivers run in user mode, the exception being kernel drivers used for debugging purposes and the timer and interrupt controller drivers. HelenOS supports both USB and sound (Sound Blaster 16 and Intel HDA). HelenOS is a single user operating system, even though there has been some experimental work done on multiuser support. HelenOS does not have a direct analogy to the translator mechanism, but the system configuration can be dynamically changed by spawning/killing user space servers that implement certain IPC protocols and by stacking services on top of each other. HelenOS currently does not support very many user applications as the development focus is on subsystems, frameworks and drivers. A very limited support exists for running a few standard development tools inside HelenOS (e.g. binutils, gcc, python and some others). See also the following question. |
