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Contrary to popular opinion, Windows isnt the only operating system in which Microsoft is investing.
The Microsoft Research team has built from scratch a 300,000-line, microkernel-based operating system that has no roots in Windows.
That OS, code-named Singularity, is slowly but steadily gaining visibility. The Microsoft Research team behind the project recently posted to the Web a 44-page technical research report about Singularity.
Company officials discussed the project publicly at the June USENIX conference. And earlier this week, Microsofts Singularity effort got some attention on Slashdot.
“What would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?” reads the opening of the Microsoft research report.
That was the question the Singularity team set out to answer two years ago.
“Singularity is not Windows. Every line of code was written from scratch,” said Galen Hunt, a senior researcher with Microsoft Research who is helping to spearhead the Singularity project.
Hunt said Singularity is the largest cross-group project inside of Microsoft Research, involving about 35 researchers across the systems and networking, compiler, testing and other research teams.
Like all Microsoft Research projects, Singularity has no definitive commercialization trajectory.
Microsoft could opt to commercialize it as is, embed elements of it in other products or simply rely on the learnings from the project to inform other efforts at the company.