ChorusOS is a

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

real-time operating system designed as a

message passing In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting ...

computing model. ChorusOS began as the Chorus distributed real-time

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

research project at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) in 1979. During the 1980s, Chorus was one of two earliest microkernels (the other being Mach) and was developed commercially by startup company Chorus Systèmes SA. Over time, development effort shifted away from distribution aspects to real-time for embedded systems. In 1997,

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

acquired Chorus Systèmes for its

technology, which went toward the new JavaOS. Sun (and henceforth Oracle) no longer supports ChorusOS. The founders of Chorus Systèmes started a new company called Jaluna in August 2002. Jaluna then became VirtualLogix, which was then acquired by Red Bend in September 2010. VirtualLogix designed embedded systems using

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and ChorusOS (which they named ''VirtualLogix C5''). C5 was described by them as a carrier grade operating system, and was actively maintained by them. The latest source tree of ChorusOS, an evolution of version 5.0, was released as

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

by Sun and is available at the Sun Download Center. The Jaluna project has completed these sources and published it online. Jaluna-1 is described there as a real-time Portable Operating System Interface (RT-

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

) layer based on FreeBSD 4.1, and the CDE cross-platform software development environment. ChorusOS is supported by popular Secure Socket Layer and

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...

(SSL/TLS) libraries such as wolfSSL.

References

{{Microkernel Distributed operating systems French inventions Microkernel-based operating systems Microkernels Real-time operating systems Sun Microsystems software ARM operating systems X86 operating systems

See also

References