Welcome to the first publicly available release of the VINO operating system from Harvard University. VINO is a research operating system designed to demonstrate one approach to extensibility and to provide a testbed upon which it is easy to conduct systems research.

This release is not a production release. We are releasing it to provide exposure to VINO, solicit input from interested researchers, and learn how people might find its functionality useful.

Here is a short list of some things that VINO 0.40 is and another list of some things it is not. Also look at the Introduction to Grafting and the directory hierarchy description.

The following guide to our terminology may be of help. See here for a more detailed discussion of graft safety, graft-callable functions, graft-safe functions, and so forth.

graft

A piece of downloaded extension code.

grafting

The act of (safely) downloading extensions into the kernel.

graft point

A location in the kernel where graft(s) can be installed.

graftable functions

Kernel functions that can be replaced with graft code (and are thus graft points.)

graft-callable functions

Kernel functions that can be called directly from grafts.

graft-safe functions

Kernel functions that can be called from grafts, but only indirectly.

MiSFIT

Our (intel-specific) software fault isolation tool. MiSFIT stands for "Minimal intel Software Fault Isolation Tool". See the paper by Christopher Small, A Tool For Constructing Safe Extensible C++ Systems (postscript)