daplebon@watcgl.UUCP (Darlene Stewart) (10/08/85)
> I know that some people at Calgary have a similar project, > using the Harmony OS. Anybody know more about that project ? Harmony is a multitasking multiprocessor operating system for real-time control developed at the National Research Council of Canada. Message passing is the mechanism used for task communication and synchronization in Harmony. Harmony is an open system; that is, it is easy to use the system on many different configurations of hardware, and in particular to support peripherals not thought of when Harmony itself was originally designed. Servers written for Harmony include: a TTY server, a virtual terminal server, a clock server, file system and file device servers, a graphics tablet server, an explicit scheduler, and a robot arm server. An ethernet TCP/IP server and a multi-window PC server are in progress. Also, several sites are using Harmony to support computer graphics applications, such as the Waterloo Paint program. Harmony is a portable system. It currently runs on a variety of Motorola 68000, 68010 and 68020 based, single- or multi-processor, Multibus or VMEbus hardware configurations. A port to the National Semiconductor 32016 has also been started. A multiprocessor system to run Harmony can be built using any off-the-shelf single board microcomputers satisfying certain requirements: - a single flat address space - a reasonable amount of on-board dual ported memory - a mechanism by which any processor can interrupt any other processor, including itself. The operating system is written in C (plus a very small amount of assembler language). Harmony itself is not designed to support a program development environment. Program development is done on some host computer. Any computer with a C cross-compiler for the target processor, a tree-structured file system, and a reasonable amount of disk space could be used as a host for Harmony development. An NRCC technical report titled "Using the Harmony Operating System" by W.M. Gentleman is available. Harmony source is also available from the National Research Council of Canada for internal research use on a somewhat informal basis. Commercial applications would require licensing. Inquiries should be directed to: W. Morven Gentleman Division of Electical Engineering National Research Council of Canada Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R8 Phone: (613) 993-3857 ...utzoo!dciem!nrcaero!nrccgs!gentleman Darlene Stewart DEE, NRCC ...utzoo!dciem!nrcaero!nrccgs!stewart ...watmath!watcgl!daplebon