A new system architecture and operating system

Jun 30, 2008 16:45 GMT  ·  By

Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server are not the only operating systems under development at Microsoft. In fact, the Redmond company is cooking a variety of projects involving Windows platforms for everything from mobile phones to embedded devices. And yet, at the same time, the Redmond company is hard at work hammering away at non-Windows operating systems. So far, Microsoft has already made available for download Singularity, but it seems that there is more to new system architecture and operating systems over at Microsoft than meets the eye. Case in point: Midori.

According to Mary Jo Foley, Midori is a project operating system intimately connected built under the lead of Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President, Technical Strategy. Rudder, in his turn, is under the responsibility of Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, who, together with Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, has replaced Chairman Bill Gates at the helm of Microsoft.

The Redmond giant is, of course, extremely hush-hush about Midori, but the company, as it has a tradition of letting details slip through its fingers, officially confirmed the existence of Midori, and its connection with Singularity. In this context, Microsoft Research has published a PowerPoint presentation about CHESS: Systematic Testing of Concurrent Programs.

Among the current CHESS applications (work in progress), Microsoft enumerates "Dryad, library for distributed dataflow programming, Singularity/Midori (OS in managed code), user-mode drivers, Cosmos (distributed file system), [and] SQL database". It is clear from the Microsoft Research document that Singularity and Midori are almost one and the same thing, and certainly enough, both non-Windows operating systems written entirely in managed code.

"Singularity is a new operating system being developed as a basis for more dependable system and application software. Singularity exploits advances in programming languages and tools to create an environment in which software is more likely to be built correctly, program behavior is easier to verify, and run-time failures can be contained. A key aspect of Singularity is an extension model based on Software-Isolated Processes (SIPs), which encapsulate pieces of an application or a system and provide information hiding, failure isolation, and strong interfaces," reads a fragment of the whitepaper presenting the Singularity project.

However, there is no telling, at this point in time, where exactly Midori will end up. Microsoft might very well be working on the successor of the Windows operating system, but if it is, it has failed to give any indication in this respect. Singularity has already reached a sufficiently developed stage in order for it to be released for usage via CodePlex.