"Stella is designed for performance." | |
"But aren't all systems ?" | |
"No, not really." |
The CAPABILITY of an operating system is the range and depth of the operating system functions provided |
Stella is designed to maximise the utility of the operating system interface. Stella does not seek to boost "benchmark" figures by providing only a minimum set of kernel functions. Minimising the functionality merely pushes the costs into the applications. This increases the applications' complexity and development costs and reduces the overall system efficiency. |
The RELIABILITY of a system is the assurance that the system will perform the right operations at the right time | |
The reliability of an operating system is not just the intrinsic reliability of the operating system code. It is also the influence of the operating system on the reliability of a system as a whole. Stella uses intrinsically safe mechanisms. This approach not only ensures that the operating system is highly reliable and predictable, but also minimises the side effects of interactions between competing tasks. |
The EFFICIENCY of the operating system is the key to both efficient systems and reduced development costs | |
Inefficient operating systems discourage the use of operating system facilities and encourage a do-it-yourself by software developers. This increases development times and application program sizes and results in further increases in the cost to the computer user. Stella is built using a combination of innovative design and careful coding. Critical operations in Stella are up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than the "market leader" operating systems. |
The ACCESSIBILITY of an operating system is the ease with which the facilities can be understood and accessed | |
The Stella philosophy is to build a very high level of capability into the system at the lowest levels. It provides a large, regular, set of operating system calls to manipulate regular data structures. Although this regularity gives rise to some redundancy, it minimises the conceptual problems in using the operating system facilities. At a higher level, Stella provides a structure to make it possible to divide large complex applications into easily programmed units without artificial limitations. |
The FLEXIBILITY of an operating system is the ease with which it adapts to a wide range of different applications |
The overall design of an operating system is often presented as a competition between flexibility and efficiency. Stella, however, has a proprietary, modular, no-kernel, design that gives unparalleled levels of efficiency and flexibility. This allows Stella to adapt to widely varying system environments and performance requirements. It can work with micro-controllers and massive servers. It can schedule tasks to microsecond deadlines while handling multithread database engines. |
Most operating systems developed since the 1970s have been implementations of operating system structural dogmas (shells, microkernels, client/server, objects, etc.) because these are beleived to be "good ideas". Performance claims are made later, when they are put on the market.
Stella, however, is not based on these abstract theoretical concepts. Stella has been developed to resolve everyday, real-world problems, maximising the five performance criteria.