HelenOS is a microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed from scratch. By decomposing the operating system functionality into tens of isolated but intensively communicating userspace servers, it provides a computing environment that has several virtues such as flexibility, increased robustness, well defined explicit interfaces, and smaller complexity of individual components. HelenOS does not aim to be another clone of Unix or some other legacy system and is not POSIX-compliant (even though it may seem POSIX-similar at times). Instead, the goal has been to design it according to what is the most elegant and right thing to do. What makes HelenOS unique among the other multiserver operating systems is its multiplatform and multiprocessor microkernel. It will run on seven different processor architectures ranging from a 32-bit uniprocessor little-endian ARMv4 to a 64-bit multicore big-endian UltraSPARC T1.
