Go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/ for any more recent
announcements and soon a FAQ.  Both contain good information on what the
OSKit is, and what it's good for.

Here are two of the recent announcements:

----------------------------------------
From: Jay Lepreau <lepreau@cs.utah.edu>
To: oskit-announce@flux.cs.utah.edu
Subject: New OSKit release, 0.97

Date: Fri Jan 15 1999

As before, go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/
and everything hangs off there; currently mostly in ftp.

The significant changes in 0.97 are:
	Many thread library fixes and improvements. CPU inheritance
	scheduling is much more stable, as is the generic threads code.

	Restructuring of the minimal C library and FreeBSD C libraries. The
	syscall to COM layer was split out into a separate library (see the
	posix directory). Both C libraries now use the posix library for the
	COM layer calls.

	Patch1 to 0.96:
	Fixes to the FreeBSD ISA device drivers. Now operational, and can be
	used to provide a proper console TTY device that does cooked input.
	See the example program console_tty.c in examples/x86/extended,
	which demonstrates how to initialize a console TTY device and have
	the FreeBSD C library make use of it.

	Changes to how boot options are handled; OSKit programs no longer
	see booting-options, such as "-h" or "-d", in argv.  These are now
	stored in the oskit_bootargv array.  This is to make porting Unix
	programs to the OSKit easier since they do not need to have special
	OSKit code to tweak argv.  Syntax is documented at the end of the
	Intro chapter.

        We provide a mini-Java-shell for the Kaffe/OSKit environment.  All
	the OSKit changes have been merged into Transvirtual's tree (but
	shortly after they did a major change in build tools so we provide a
	separate Kaffe tar file for the nonce).
	
The above improvements were mainly due to the good work of Leigh Stoller;
Bart Robinson did the booting/cmdline work and Godmar Back does a lot in all
Kaffe-related work.

   Fixes for all the bugs/fixes you sent in (thanks!) and others, including:   
	-Fixed remote GDB code so function calls from GDB work correctly.
	-Linux ext2fs fixes
	-lmm assert fix
	-fix sleep record leak in linux/dev
	-mklinuximage upgraded to match other mk* scripts
	-Bad linuxboot.bin.good replaced with good uuencoded linuxboot.bin.uue.

   Small stuff, including:
	-Changes to support Kaffe.
 	-Add a #define for _OSKIT_VERSION in oskit/version.h.
	-Some new files in preparation for importing secure filesystem and
	 networking components.
	-Document arg syntax for mk*image scripts, in their comments.


----------------------------------------
From: Jay Lepreau <lepreau@cs.utah.edu>
To: oskit-announce@flux.cs.utah.edu
Subject: OSKit 0.96 was released today
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 98 21:58:09 MST

Go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/
and follow your nose for all the goodies.

Briefly: it's up to 30 component libraries now, comes with 45 example
mini-kernels, a 500 page (help!) document with few blank pages anymore
(although still lots of gaps in it), can be configured with full
multithreading and Posix threads, has prototype CPU inheritance scheduling
in it (5 policies including 2 real time), has a hierarchical network
link-sharing component, has a "simple virtual memory" component including
pageout.  Has most Linux [and BSD] filesystems, several networking libs, the full
FreeBSD library (which means most of Posix), lots of device drivers (perhaps
60), profiling support, and some minimal video and window manager support.
A currently inelegant but useful component lets you run many kernels on Unix
in user-mode, which is great for debugging.  Most components now use the COM
object model, which is a first in internal OS design.

Just about every component is optional, and unlike any other OS, is designed
to fit into *other* operating systems and environments if desired.  Of
course the OSKit's got problems, too, don't we all.  There are a ton of
things that it needs.  One nice thing in that regard is that it's easy to
incrementally add to the OSKit.  Let's do it!

Re licensing, the OSKit comes with full source, and is GPL'ed; "open
source" is now the "in" term apparently.  If a business or someone has
trouble with the GPL, the University is willing to talk about other options.

As a special holiday bonus-- for such patience on your part-- this release
supports a version, which we provide, of the Kaffe OpenVM (Java to you) from
Transvirtual.  Thus you can link them together and you've got Kaffe on the
bare HW [but without local display support], or with a configuration change,
you can run the same "Java OS" on
top of Unix.  Our Kaffe changes will go into the next beta release.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson and his company for giving Kaffe to the world.

We are grateful to the long line of free software project from whom we drew
code, including Mach, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and XFree86.  The GNU build
tools were, as always, invaluable.  DARPA's support has been great.

Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge the fine team at Utah that has
accomplished so much, and with whom I have the honor to work with.  Check
out the CREDITS file for their names.

Jay Lepreau
University of Utah
lepreau@cs.utah.edu
