Nemesis (operating system)

Nemesis was an operating system that was designed by the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Citrix Systems.

Nemesis was conceived with multimedia uses in mind. In a microkernel environment, an application is typically implemented by a number of processes, most of which are servers performing work on behalf of more than one client. This leads to enormous difficulty in accounting for resource usage. In a Monolithic kernel based system, multimedia applications spend most of their time in the kernel, leading to similar problems.[1]

The guiding principle in the design of Nemesis was to structure the operating system in such a way that the majority of code could execute in the application process itself. Nemesis therefore had an extremely small lightweight kernel and performed most operating system functions in shared libraries, which executed in the user’s process.

The ISAs that Nemesis supports include x86 (Intel i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, and Pentium II), Alpha and ARM (StrongARM SA–110). Nemesis also runs on evaluation boards (21064 and 21164).