Wombat (operating system)

Wombat was a research operating system developed at the University of Adelaide in Australia during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was designed as a distributed, object-oriented operating system, exploring novel concepts in microkernel architecture, message passing, and object persistence.

The primary goals of the Wombat project were to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of building a robust and extensible operating system based on object-oriented principles, with a particular focus on distributed computing environments. It aimed to provide a flexible platform for experimenting with different aspects of operating system design, including concurrency control, resource management, and fault tolerance.

Key features of the Wombat operating system included:

• Microkernel Architecture: Wombat adopted a microkernel architecture, with essential operating system services implemented within the kernel and other functionalities implemented as user-level servers. This design promoted modularity and allowed for greater flexibility in customizing the operating system.

• Object-Oriented Design: The entire operating system was structured around objects, providing a uniform mechanism for accessing and managing resources. This approach simplified the design and development process and facilitated code reuse.

• Message Passing: Communication between different components of the operating system, including the kernel and user-level servers, was based on message passing. This enabled a clean separation of concerns and simplified the development of distributed applications.

• Distributed Computing Support: Wombat was designed to support distributed computing environments, allowing applications to seamlessly access resources located on different machines. The system provided mechanisms for object migration and remote procedure calls, enabling the development of distributed applications.

• Object Persistence: The system implemented object persistence, allowing objects to be stored and retrieved from secondary storage. This simplified the development of applications that required long-term data storage and retrieval.

The Wombat project contributed to the understanding of object-oriented operating system design and influenced subsequent research in distributed systems. While Wombat was not commercially deployed, it served as a valuable platform for exploring innovative concepts in operating system architecture.