9fans archive / 1997 / 05 / 60 /    prev next

From: james@min... james@min...
Subject: VSTa
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 13:33:27 +0100

what do people think of vsta?
<URL:http://terra.igcom.net/~jeske/VSTa/>

from the faq:

>VSTa is quite different than your typical free UNIX. First, it does not
>even try to be exactly a UNIX; areas which have proven to be
>problematic for extensibility or efficiency have been changed. For
>instance, signals are strings, as are error "numbers". Thus, VSTa is
>much more of a platform for experimentation with beyond UNIX ideas than
>simply another implementation of UNIX.
>
>VSTa was mainly inspired by two commercial systems, QNX and Plan-9. QNX
>provided an example and the motivation for a clean, small, and
>efficient microkernel organization and has the performance that any
>kernel (of any organization) would be proud to have (see
>http://www.qnx.com). Plan-9 is the next OS from the fathers of UNIX and
>supports a filesystem view similar to QNX with an interesting system
>organization (see http://plan9.att.com). VSTa pushes to incorporate the
>strengths of both these systems into an OS which is both useful and
>available in source form for experimentation.

it does seem to incorperate most of the Good Bits of plan9 and, unlike
plan9, is free.


-- 
 J.F.Carter                    <URL:http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~james/>