Can Singularity heal Microsoft’s Windows Vista wounds? appears today on TG Daily

The below extract from that article remembers me about the idea of Andrew S. Tanenbaum about micro-kernel in his “Operating Systems Design and Implementation” and the debate between him and Linus, creator of Linux.

It seems the idea of NOOKS (that Microsofts tried to integrated it inside Windows Vista) failed.

The main ideas of Singularity are micro-kernel and isolation (virtualization). Microsoft probably will integrate its virtualization solution (Viridian Architechture) into Singularity.

The source code of Singularity can be downloaded from this web-site. You can read all about “Singularity” from Microsoft at this link.

” According to Microsoft, the basic idea behind Singularity is to create a more dependable OS and, in doing so, leave traditional operating system strategies behind and create a completely new architecture. The key developers of Singularity, Galen Hunt and Jim Larus, said that all current operating systems such as Windows, Linux and MacOS can be traced back to an operating system called Multics, which has its origins in the 1960s. In effect, current operating systems are still based, in part, on thoughts and criteria from 40 years ago, Hunt claims.

Of course, the challenges the of computing environment are very different today, which led to the idea to build Singularity from scratch, with modern technologies based on current challenges. “Our goal was to make Singularity small enough, simple enough, and well-designed enough that you can try out radical new ideas quickly,” Hunt says. “Our thinking is that a researcher with a great new idea for improving operating systems could get from idea to published paper in under a year using Singularity.”

So, while Windows Vista is an operating system that has evolved over decades, Singularity is entirely new. It is based on a so-called micro-kernel, which performs the crucial role of dividing systems resources among competing programs and abstracting the complexities of system hardware. According to Microsoft, more than 90% of the OS kernel is written in Sing#, an extension of the C# high-level programming language. The developers claim that this fact alone hands Singularity security advantages over operating systems written in lower-level languages such as C or C++. For example, by using C#, the researchers say they can prevent a class of errors known as buffer overruns, thereby eliminating a key area of vulnerability typically exploited by worms and viruses.”