Last Updated on: 28th October 2023, 01:20 pm
Web site: eecs.harvard.edu/~syrah/
Origin: USA
Category: workstation
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: unknown
Based on: NetBSD
Wikipedia: VINO
Media: Install
The last version | Released: 0.50 | December 1998
VINO – 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.