i. Executive Summary

During a first phase of the project the main goal was to examine the extent to which the TenDRA technology could be used to compile a complete operating sytem. This experiment was carried out on the Unixware operating system on an Intel 486 platform. Although Unix sources are known to be compiler dependent, it was found that most of the code could be compiled with no, or minor, modifications. Details of the results can be found in a report.

The goal of this second phase of the project was to study the feasibility of producing Unix commands in architecture neutral (ANDF) format which could be readily ported to different hardware platforms running the same operating system. The target system chosen for this second phase was Linux, which was available on both the Intel and DEC Alpha platforms (although the latter was incomplete at the beginning of the project).

The experiment carried out during this second phase was very successful. A significant amount of complex code was converted to the architecture neutral ANDF format, and the portability of this code was demonstrated. However, due to time constraints, the number of commands ported to both platforms was more limited than had been hoped. The project also provided some interesting lessons about the strengths and limitations of the ANDF/TenDRA technology and about API issues. This is the final report on work undertaken on the Linux operating system on the Intel/i386 and Digital/Alpha platforms.