Computer software is the soul of a computer system, while operating system is the core of software runtime supporting technology. In the Internet era, both software running environments and software development methods have been undergoing dramatic changes, thus we urgently need a new software paradigm for internet computing. Chinese researchers have named this new paradigm “internetware”, which has brought a series of challenges to software technologies including operating systems. This article focuses on operating systems for internetware, or internetware operating systems. We first briefly review the history of operating systems, and then introduce the concepts, basic characteristics and key supporting technologies for internetware operating systems. After summarizing the current development status of internetware operating systems, we present a brief outlook and trends for future operating systems.

operating systems  /  internetware  /  internetware operating system  /  software-defined