French microkernel house Chorus Systemes SA will make its basic but unwieldy Nucleus kernel more of a ready-to-use affair by providing the ability to develop and debug embedded and real-time systems on it for Intel Corp 80386 and 80486 target systems from remote SunOS workstations. Chorus/ClassiX also enables real-time systems, using the kernel, to access external Unix devices and services. To achieve the desired effect, Chorus has added a c_actor server application programming interface for cross-system development to the native Nucleus programming interface, providing access to Unix or Posix real-time extensions in subsystems such as its Chorus/Mix Unix services implemented on top of Nucleus. The application programming interface includes access to Network File System, sockets to the BSD Unix variant over TCP/IP and some 100 system calls to input-output and library functions, string, character and network handling. Disk drives can be integrated to access local disks. Applications written to the c_actor on Chorus/ClassiX are loaded, controlled and debugged from a Unix host using the GDB debugger which Chorus has previously extended for multithreading support. Applications are run in a user mode which provides full protection for debugging during development, or in supervisor mode, enabling hardware events such as interrupts or traps to be managed by the developer. Applications can be distributed on to multiple targets using Chorus’s kernel-to-kernel inter-processor communications services. Chorus will develop, maintain and support Chorus/ClassiX source development kits environments for iAPX-86, Motorola Inc 68000 and Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc systems. It will add support for HP-UX and Intel Unix host development boxes. Intel iAPX-86 evaluation binaries are available. Chorus’ Nucleus customers will be upgraded to Chorus/ClassiX. Elsewhere Chorus is piloting its anticipated object interfaces at beta sites as COOL, the Chorus Object Oriented Layer supporting Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant object request brokers. It is currently formulating a packaging plan for the software. Its UnixWare microkernel development work is proceeding apace although Novell Inc has yet to choose the technology it will eventually use for the SuperNOS UnixWare-NetWare kernel.
