HelenOS

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HelenOS

Website	www.helenos.eu
OS family	Experimental
Source model	Open Source
Latest stable release	0.3.0 / Mar 18, 2008
Kernel type	Microkernel
License	BSD
Working state	Current

HelenOS is an operating system based on a preemptible microkernel design. The source code of HelenOS is published under free software licences, making the operating system free software.

1 Features
2 Development
3 Available ports
4 Source-code licensing
5 Research use
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Features

HelenOS is based on a microkernel design. It is fully preemptible. It provides all the facilities expected of a modern kernel, including multitasking, multithreading, and symmetric multiprocessing, but is small and easy to expand. Particular features of HelenOS are: lightweight IPC, thread-local storage, and user-space managed fibrils.

[edit] Development

HelenOS is developed mainly by staff and students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague, with help from other contributors around the world.

[edit] Available ports

HelenOS has been ported to run on many different computer architectures including ARM, AMD64 (x86-64), IA32, IA64 (Itanium), MIPS, PowerPC (32-bit only), and sparc64. There are also incomplete ports to 64-bit PowerPC and the Xen hypervisor paravirtualization environment on IA32.

[edit] Source-code licensing

The source code of HelenOS is published under the BSD licence, while some third-party components are available under the GNU General Public License, and others are public domain. Both of these licences are free software licences, making HelenOS free software.