The NOVA project is happy to announce that there is a prerelease of NUL, the NOVA userland, available for download at
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~kauer/nova/
under the terms of GPLv2.
NUL is the multi-server user environment designed for NOVA. It is componentized into host-drivers, device models and virtual executors.
From these components applications are build. The most prominent apps
are the Partition Manager, called sigma0, and the x86 VMM (Virtual-Machine Monitor) called Vancouver.
The VMM allows to run unmodified guest operating systems on top of the microhypervisor. It contains the virtual device models to give an OS the illusion of running on bare hardware. Furthermore it emulates realmode and MMIO instructions and provides a virtual BIOS.
Furthermore, we prepared a Demo CD that shows NOVA in action, with multiple VMs running Linux, L4/Fiasco and L4Ka::Pistachio. The demo runs on platforms that support Intel VT-x or AMD-V NPT. It can be downloaded from
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~jsteckli/nova/NOVA-Xmas-Alpha.iso
Merry Christmas and happy hacking,
Bernhard Kauer