Web site: www-spin.cs.washington.edu
Origin: USA
Category: workstation
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: x86
Based on: Independent
Wikipedia: SPIN
Media:
The last version | Released: 1.0 | November 1996
SPIN – an operating system that blurs the distinction between kernels and applications. Applications traditionally live in user-level address spaces, separated from kernel resources and services by an expensive protection boundary.
It is a research project which was developed at the University of Washington.
With SPIN, applications can specialize the kernel by dynamically linking new code into the running system. Kernel extensions can add new kernel services, replace default policies, or simply migrate application functionality into the kernel address space.
Sensitive kernel interfaces are secured via a restricted linker and the type-safe properties of the Modula-3 programming language. The result is a flexible operating system that helps applications run fast but doesn’t crash.
One set of kernel extensions provides an application programming interface (API) that emulates the Digital UNIX system call interface. This allows Unix applications to run on SPIN.
