A Contribution to Techniques for Building Dependable Operating Systems

Even though development of a new operating system is rarely a good (business) plan, in a small scale it could be a fruitful experiment in software engineering. In this document we describe results of our effort to build a dependable operating system. By adopting and building upon recent advances in the programming language design, we show one possible way how can we reduce development costs of dependable (operating) systems. During the course of our work, we focused primarily on aspects that cannot be added as an afterthought—e.g. dependability of the operating system—rather than those which can be added anytime in the future—e.g. rich services of the operating system.