History
The primary developer of EROS was Jonathan S. Shapiro. He is also the driving force behind Coyotos, which is an "evolutionary step" beyond the EROS operating system.
The EROS project started in 1991 as a clean-room reconstruction of an earlier system, KeyKOS. KeyKOS was an operating system developed by Key Logic, Inc., and was a direct continuation of work on the earlier GNOSIS (Great New Operating System In the Sky) system created by Tymshare, Inc. The KeyKOS system offered a degree of security and reliability that remains unduplicated today (2006). The circumstances surrounding Key Logic's unfortunate demise in 1991 made licensing KeyKOS impractical. Since KeyKOS did not run on popular commodity processors in any case, the decision was made to reconstruct it from the publicly available documentation.
By late 1992, it had become clear that processor architecture had changed significantly since the introduction of the capability idea, and it was no longer obvious that component-structured systems were practical. Microkernel-based systems, which similarly favor large numbers of processes and IPC, were facing severe performance challenges, and it was uncertain if these could be successfully resolved. The x86 architecture was clearly emerging as the dominant architecture but the expensive user/supervisor transition latency on the 386 and 486 presented serious challenges for process-based isolation. The EROS project was turning into a research effort, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania to become the focus of Shapiro's dissertation research. By 1999, a high performance implementation for the Pentium processor had been demonstrated that was directly performance competitive with the L4 microkernel family, which is known for its exceptional speed in IPC. The EROS confinement mechanism had been formally verified, in the process creating a general formal model for secure capability systems.
In 2000, Shapiro joined the faculty of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, the goal was to show how to use the facilities provided by the EROS kernel to construct secure and defensible servers at application level. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory, EROS was used as the basis for a trusted window system, a high-performance, defensible network stack, and the beginnings of a secure web browser. It was also used to explore the effectiveness of lightweight static checking. In 2003, some very challenging security issues were discovered that are intrinsic to any system architecture based on synchronous IPC primitives (notably including EROS and L4). Work on EROS halted in favor of Coyotos, which resolves these issues.
As of 2006, EROS and its successors are the only widely available capability systems that run on commodity hardware.
Read more about this topic: EROS (microkernel)
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