| Research |
Just as its predecessor PEACE, PURE realizes the idea of a family of object oriented operating systems. In opposition to PEACE, however, PURE strives for a very fine granular dynamic reconfiguration (i.e. based upon passive rather than only active objects). The goal are special purpose operating systems with minimal memory usage. In this sense PURE can be regarded as a box of building blocks for the construction of a wide variety of operating systems.
Object orientation plays a major role when it comes to the realization of this approach. The implementation of the PURE family of operating systems follows the object oriented paradigm. New members of the family are created by specialization, i.e. derivation of existing members. Dual objects, a concept that was initially developed for PEACE, are used to construct the more complex (client/server) members of the family. With a minimal overhead of runtime, dual objects support the parallel/distributed (system) programming. A dual object is an instance of a dual class which in return is an annotated C++ class. The annotations are processed by a class generator that automatically builds the client/server stubs for the remote object invocations.
The development of the PURE family currently focusses on the area of parallel (distributed) embedded real-time systems. A short-term goal is the replacement of the PEACE kernel by a PURE femto kernel to allow the execution of PEACE applications on top of PURE. The intended compatibility between PURE and PEACE should be at the level of the dual objects.