[ANNOUNCE] NOVA Userland 0.1

[Bernhard Kauer]

The NOVA project is happy to announce that there is a prerelease of
NUL, the NOVA userland, available for download at

    http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~kauer/nova/ 

under the terms of GPLv2.

NUL is the multi-server user environment designed for NOVA.  It is
componentized into host-drivers, device models and virtual executors.
>From these components applications are build.  The most prominent apps
are the Partition Manager, called sigma0, and the x86 VMM
(Virtual-Machine Monitor) called Vancouver.

The VMM allows to run unmodified guest operating systems on top of the
microhypervisor.  It contains the virtual device models to give an OS
the illusion of running on bare hardware.  Furthermore it emulates
realmode and MMIO instructions and provides a virtual BIOS.

Furthermore, we prepared a Demo CD that shows NOVA in action, with
multiple VMs running Linux, L4/Fiasco and L4Ka::Pistachio.  The demo
runs on platforms that support Intel VT-x or AMD-V NPT. It can be
downloaded from

    http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~jsteckli/nova/NOVA-Xmas-Alpha.iso


Merry Christmas and happy hacking,

      Bernhard Kauer