Web site: pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/exo/
Origin: USA
Category: Exokernel
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: unknown
Based on: unknown
Wikipedia:
Media: Install
The last version | Released: 1998 (?)
Xok – an OS based upon the idea of an exokernel, created by a computer science research team at MIT.
Exokernel is an operating system kernel developed by the MIT Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group, and also a class of similar operating systems.
XOK is able to compile most UNIX programs (perl, gcc, emacs, etc.) with little or no change, and has equal to or greater speed than FreeBSD when using standard libOS’s. However, when using specilized LibOS’s, XOK is able to get great performance boosts. The greatest of which has been the Cheetah web server, running at eight times its normal speed on FreedBSD or Linux.
“The newest exokernel is XOK, which runs on PC hardware, and ExOS, our first library operating system (libos). The ExOS library provides a user-level and extensible implementation of an UNIX operating system. Most UNIX applications like gcc, perl, apache, tcsh, and telnet compile and work without changes using ExOS. Further, measurements of application performance show that ExOS performs at least as well as OpenBSD and FreeBSD and much better when using specialized libos’s. For example, the Cheetah web server built on top of XOK performs eight times faster than NCSA or Harvest and three to four times faster than IIS running on Windows NT Enterprise Edition.”
There are also other exokernel-based OSes: Aegis and ExOS.
