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- From: birger@sdata.no (Birger A. Wathne)
- Subject: New OS on ARM?
- Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 13:01:50 GMT
-
- I found this in Unigram, X, The weekly UNIX newspaper.
-
-
- + JAPAN BACKS UK FIRM TAO's COMPACT
- PARALLEL OBJECT OPERATING SYSTEM
-
- An object-oriented parallel operating system that is completely
- portable between all widely used processors, so much so that
- applications do not even need to be recompiled is the creation of
- a British company - Tao Systems Ltd of Belsize Park, London NW -
- which has substantial financial backing from Japan. Taos relies
- on a Virtual Processor - a 32-bit machine with 16 registers and
- support for standard data types and addressing modes, for which
- all applications are written. The run-time code is loaded onto a
- real processor and translated on the fly into the chip's native
- instruction set. It is currently up on the Transputer and the
- 80386, with 68000 family, ARM RISC and MIPS R3000 processors a
- few months away. The most significant feature of Taos is that
- the kernel takes up just 13Kb of memory - and is blindingly fast
- on complex applications such as graphics ray tracing. Details of
- the operating system below.
-
-
- + TAOS: THE PARALLEL OBJECT- ORIENTED OPERATING SYSTEM
- THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR?
- By Chris Rose
-
- Imagine an operating system that is suitable for everything from
- photo copiers to games consoles to video-graphics work to
- transaction processing. It is completely parallel and can
- intelligently farm bits of itself and applications across
- multiple processors, or alternatively sit on just one. Now
- imagine that it is processor-independent and is already running
- on 80386 and 80486, and Transputers, with the 68000 family, ARM
- RISC and MIPS R3000 processors a few months away. Now say that
- the applications are completely processor-independent too - that
- you don't even have to re-compile them to move them from one
- machine type to another, and indeed bits of them may even wander
- from processor type to processor type in the course of execution.
- Why not add network support so that if you plug an extra personal
- computer into the local network, everyone's applications will
- automatically run a bit faster (and they already run very quickly
- indeed)? Finally, for good measure, let's say that the operating
- system kernel takes up just 13Kb of RAM and the entire executive
- and developers code will fit onto a single 720Kb floppy when
- compressed.
-
- This is not fantasy, this is a real-life operating called Taos
- from Tao Systems Ltd, a small company based in North London.
- Moreover Tao claims to have found substantial funding and board-
- level interest from some of the biggest Japanese computer and
- electronics companies, the identities of which will be announced
- this summer. Chris Hinsley, Tao Systems chief executive and the
- operating system's architect claims without a blush that the
- Japanese computer industry will completely steam-roll the US and
- Europeans, and that Taos will be the fuel. Funding is being
- provided by a separate marketing company, TK Suppliers, based in
- Tokyo. This has paid for the first phase of development and is
- entirely owned by a group of Japanese businesspeople plus Francis
- Charig, formerly head of trading systems business at the London
- Stock Exchange, who acts as managing director and the link
- between TK and Tao Systems. In this way Tao gets money, but also
- retains its independence: Charig says that Tao Systems has turned
- down a number of buy-out bids from the US in the last few months.
- The European Commission didn't prove that helpful either: Hinsley
- makes no secret of his frustration with the Esprit parallel
- processing projects, which he sees as obsessed with making Unix
- parallel - a quest that he sees as fundamentally misguided and
- doomed to failure in the long term. In the end, too, it was the
- Japanese that turned out to be most amenable to the idea of
- throwing away and starting from scratch; which is what Taos does.
-
- Heritage
-
- Chris Hinsley started off as a successful commercial author of
- arcade games for home computers, and many of Taos's concepts
- spring from his original need to produce code that would transfer
- easily between a plethora of machines. The approach he took was
- to develop a Virtual Processor - a 32-bit machine with 16
- registers and support for standard data types and addressing
- modes, which didn't actually exist. All applications, and the
- bulk of Taos itself is written in Virtual Processor code, so that
- at run-time the code is loaded onto a real processor and
- translated on the fly into the chip's native instruction set.
- The practical upshot is that, as long as you have the right
- translator, the Virtual Processor code will run without
- modification on any chip. The 80386-80486 translator is the
- latest to be finished after the original Transputer
- implementations and Hinsley says that now they have first couple
- under their belts, it will only take a month or two to write each
- additional processor implementation. Moreover you can have
- heterogeneous networks of different processors all running
- co-operatively. Taos' games-based heritage brings other benefits
- too. Games tend to be inherently object-oriented, says Hinsley
- (all those sprites moving about and interacting) and games
- authors often have to cram a lot into a tiny amount of memory
- while stretching hardware to its limits. As a result Taos is
- object-oriented at a very fine level and it takes the idea of
- dynamic linking to its logical conclusion. This means that
- instead of being a monolithic operating system running monolithic
- applications, the program just calls in bits of code as they are
- needed from libraries of routines - rather the same way that ICL
- Plc's VME mainframe operating system works.
-
- Load-balancing
-
- This accounts for the small size of the Taos microkernel, which
- provides memory and process management, load balancing and
- precious little else. Even the Virtual Processor translator is
- retrieved only when needed, and it is Hinsley's boast that no
- piece of code is ever loaded onto the processor that isn't about
- to be run. As a result, load-balancing also becomes virtually
- trivial, he says. Each processor on the network runs its own
- copy of the 13Kb microkernel and when a new thread is started,
- the kernel on that chip compares its loading with its immediate
- neighbours. The calculation takes account of processing power
- and the speed of communication links, and then the request to
- start the thread is handed on to the processor with the least to
- do. This processor carries out exactly the same load balancing
- process until the thread finds a home, is translated by the
- chip's translator and begins to run.
-
- Fancy graphics
-
- All this talk of bits of code being pulled out of disk and cache,
- being translated on the fly and wandering around networks sounds
- horrendously slow, but appears in practice to be blindingly fast.
- A personal computer with a single 66MHz 80486 will render a
- broadcast quality, full screen, complex piece of ray-tracing in
- less than a minute. That is with no fancy graphics chips and
- using a standard VESA video adapter board. The 80486 translator
- floating point code is still being optimised and in a couple of
- weeks Charig says that time will be cut to between 20 and 30
- seconds. This summer the company will have a board, costing
- around #1,500 containing four MIPS R3050 RISC processors. This
- will slot into a personal computer and enable the 80486 and the
- MIPS processors run code cooperatively, bringing our same ray
- trace example down to less than 10 seconds. Exactly where all
- this speed comes from is difficult to pin down; obviously Virtual
- Processor code is pretty low level stuff and assembler code tends
- to run quickly by its very nature, however Hinsley is optimistic
- that the kind of performance seen today will be preserved even
- when applications are written using the C++ and Parallel Basic
- compilers that are currently nearing completion - compilers that
- produce Virtual Processor code, of course. Programmers do not
- need to worry about the fact that their applications may be
- running in parallel, Hinsley says, they merely need to think
- about the appropriate size of object and Taos will do the rest.
-
- Four markets
-
- A product's quality or degree of innovation is never a guarantee
- of success and a lot will depend on just how hefty these
- forthcoming Japanese backers turn out to be. So will Taos
- succeed? There are four markets in which its designers say it
- will do equally well: graphics, we have already outlined; then
- there are games consoles - Taos' original home territory; and
- embedded applications: it may sound odd to have Taos running in a
- photocopier or a drinks machine, but the tiny kernel makes it
- ideal, says Hinsley. It may also seem improbable that the
- world's transaction processing systems will suddenly switch to
- Taos, but on the other hand the company is already hard at work
- building SQL interface objects and others that will confer Posix
- compliance, it has even chatted to a bank about payroll
- applications. Its acceptance will be helped by the pragmatic
- approach that Tao Systems is taking in integrating its baby with
- existing systems. So, for example with the 80386 and 80486
- implementations, the company has decided to stick with the MS-DOS
- file system. Installing Taos then, is as simple as copying the
- files to your hard disk, typing TAOS and you're in. Similarly,
- there will be a variant of the 68000 family translator tweaked to
- make use of the Macintosh file system. The trouble is that both
- the product and the claims made for it are so unusual that it is
- impossible to predict whether it will disappear, never to be seen
- again, or become the biggest thing since MS-DOS. Towards the end
- of the demonstration, Hinsley leant back and said "of course
- there's no reason why the fridge shouldn't be doing a bit of your
- mandelbrot." And he wasn't really joking...
-
- ---
- Birger A. Wathne
- Email : birger@sdata.no | Until Sept. 9. 1993 From Sept. 9.
- Private: Fjoesangervn. 133, N-5032 Minde | Tel: +47 5 200062 (+47 55 20 00 62)
- Work : Skrivervik Data A/S | Tel: +47 5 543740 (+47 55 54 37 40)
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