IBM Releases FusedOS Operating System

Just days after a brand new cloud operating system was released, IBM is out with a new operating system of its own. FusedOS is IBM's new research project that's now an open-source general purpose OS.

FusedOS is self-described as "General-purpose operating systems provide a rich set of functionality to support a broad set of applications, whereas specialized systems such as the IBM Blue Gene/Q are tailored to a specific category of applications. Therefore, specialized systems provide only the features that are absolutely required, in a way to provide the targeted applications the best possible quality of service. FusedOS is our approach to bridge the gap between these two extremes. We combine a general-purpose OS with a specialized OS and run them side by side using resource partitioning. In contrast to operating systems running next to each other in a virtualized environment, the OS instances in FusedOS are much closer and process interaction can cross the boundary between them."

FusedOS will be out of reach to most Phoronix readers as the operating system prototype is geared to run on the Blue Gene/Q super-computer. The OS is a combination of Linux with the IBM CNK (Compute Node Kernel).

For those wanting to learn more about this new FusedOS research project at IBM, see its GitHub page. The initial import of the code was just made publicly available on Thursday.