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Overview
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EUMEL is different from conventional operating systems in a lot of ways. Some
of them were neccessary due to hardware constraints at the time and others
were deliberatly designed this way. EUMEL’s key features are:
Hardware independence
The OS has *two* hardware abstraction layers, significantly improving its
portability_. The first one, Software/Hardware (SHard), provides functions
for a concrete machine, such as the Olivetti M20, Amiga ST or IBM PC
AT/XT. EUMEL0 (Urlader), the second layer, implements a virtual machine on
top of a specific processor architecture like Z80 or x86. Programs are
compiled into bytecode for the virtual EUMEL0 machine, making them portable
across different machines.
Single-level store
Every object (dataspace) lives in a single, virtual address space. A
dataspace is divided into pages, which can reside in memory or on disk.
The operating system transparently moves (swaps) pages to disk if they have
not been in use lately and reads them back as soon as a process needs the
data. Every file and every task is a dataspace.
Copy on write
Pages are shareable and can be copied without a cost. EUMEL automatically
unshares them if changes are made to one of the copies.
Persistence
Since everything resides in the single-level store the machine can powered
off and back on again, with all tasks restarting execution from the last
snapshot. These are created on request and every 15 minutes.
Time-sharing, multi-user and network-transparency
A single machine running EUMEL is capable of serving multiple “thin
clients” connected via serial lines. Additionally users can share files and
start remote processes by linking multiple machines with *EUMEL-Netz*.
One-language concept
*ELAN* is system implementation language, programming language, shell
language and documentation language.
.. _portability: hardware_
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