07-11-2012, 04:52 PM
Life After Windows - Microsoft Midori Operating System
Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server are not the only operating systems under development
at Microsoft. In fact, the Redmond company is cooking a variety of projects involving
Windows platforms for everything from mobile phones to embedded devices. And yet, at the
same time, the Redmond company is hard at work hammering away at non-Windows
operating systems. So far, Microsoft has already made available for download Singularity,
but it seems that there is more to new system architecture and operating systems over at
Microsoft than meets the eye. Case in point: Midori. According to Mary Jo Foley, Midori is a
project operating system intimately connected built under the lead of Eric Rudder, Senior
Vice President, Technical Strategy. Rudder, in his turn, is under the responsibility of Craig
Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, who, together with Ray Ozzie, Chief Software
Architect, has replaced Chairman Bill Gates at the helm of Microsoft. The Redmond giant is,
of course, extremely hush-hush about Midori, but the company, as it has a tradition of letting
details slip through its fingers, officially confirmed the existence of Midori, and its connection
with Singularity. In this context, Microsoft Research has published a PowerPoint
presentation about CHESS: Systematic Testing of Concurrent Programs. Among the
current CHESS applications (work in progress), Microsoft enumerates "Dryad, library for
distributed dataflow programming, Singularity/Midori (OS in managed code), user-mode
drivers, Cosmos (distributed file system), [and] SQL database". It is clear from the Microsoft
Research document that Singularity and Midori are almost one and the same thing, and
certainly enough, both non-Windows operating systems written entirely in managed code.
"Singularity is a new operating system being developed as a basis for more dependable
system and application software. Singularity exploits advances in programming languages
and tools to create an environment in which software is more likely to be built correctly,
program behavior is easier to verify, and run-time failures can be contained. A key aspect of
Singularity is an extension model based on Software-Isolated Processes (SIPs), which
encapsulate pieces of an application or a system and provide information hiding, failure
isolation, and strong interfaces," reads a fragment of the whitepaper presenting the
Singularity project. However, there is no telling, at this point in time, where exactly Midori
will end up. Microsoft might very well be working on the successor of the Windows
operating system, but if it is, it has failed to give any indication in this respect. Singularity
has already reached a sufficiently developed stage in order for it to be released for usage
via CodePlex.