Vino

 

VINO OS

Release 0.55 (cancelled)
Release 0.50 (Dec 1998)
Release 0.40 (Dec 1997)

eVINO (embedded VINO)

VINO-related papers

Licensing
Anonymous ftp server
 
The VINO Operating System 


 

What is VINO?

VINO is an extensible operating system. This means that application software, running with the privileges of an ordinary user, can provide extensions to operating system (specifically, operating system kernel) functionality. More importantly, this can be done both safely and reasonably securely, and also efficiently; efficiently enough to make it worthwhile.

VINO is also a Unix-like operating system. It includes an almost complete set of Unix user-mode tools and will compile and run much standard Unix software unmodified. It also offers some extended functionality beyond what is traditionally available under Unix.

VINO is largely derived from NetBSD. The core of the kernel and some of the highly kernel-dependent user tools are VINO code, written mostly from scratch. The "uninteresting" parts, from a researcher's point of view, including most of the user-level tools and device drivers, were assimilated from NetBSD to avoid having to write them ourselves.

VINO does not support multiprocessor systems; however, for reasons connected to the extensibility research, it features a fully preemptible kernel with fine-grained locking. This requirement was the fundamental reason we wrote a whole operating system: at the time, none of the freely available operating systems offered fine-grained locking.

This is the original poster for the VINO project, and this is an old poster about the extensibility work. You can also read the original design goals.