Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Midori ( A non-windows operating system by Microsoft)

Today I want to discuss something about a Microsoft Operating system which is still in its nuance. No! It is not a new version of Windows. The codename for the operating system is Midori. This is successor of Microsoft's other Operating system which was named as Singularity. Singularity is available for download for free on Microsoft website. Compared to Singularity, this would not be a research project but a complete commercial operating system project.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and Cloud computing, this is all about sharing. This could be sharing of pictures, movies, games. But this could also be sharing of resources to make systems having capabilities which no one has ever thought of.

Midori is designed to be the future of Cloud computing. This would be a whole new operating system with architecture different from Windows. The architecture is named as Asynchronous Promise Architecture. The local and distributed resource would not be different for applications to consume. It is a net centric, component based operating system which is designed for connected systems. This would be completely developed in managed code. This would not depend upon the application installed on local systems. The hardware, on which the OS is run, would also not be a dependency. It is said that the core principal of Midori's design would be concurrency. This
would be an asynchronous only architecture designed for task concurrency
and parallel use of resources (both local and distributed). This would also
support different topologies, like Client-Server, Peer-to-Peer, multi-tier,
forming a heterogeneous mesh.

It appears that the operating system would be based on Service Oriented architecture with different components scattered in the cloud providing different services to the operating systems. Some say that the objects would be immutable like String in .net.

The kernel would be divided into two parts. One is Micro Kernel which is non-managed. This layer would be encapsulated in a managed Kernel services layer which would provide other functionalities. The scheduling framework is called Resource Management Infrastructure (RMI). This is a power based scheduler to support mobile devices.

The one thing that Microsoft will have to focus on is the co-existence of this new system with Microsoft Windows and applications designed to run on it. May be a runtime is provided just to support the applications designed to run on Microsoft Windows. When I am saying this, I mean COM based applications because managed applications would have no problem in running on a new CLR designed for Midori like we have MONO for Linux. So it can be seen that the applications software running on this, would be coded in .net languages.

Let's wait for the interesting things Microsoft releases about this new Operating System.

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