The Kylin operating system is a server OS focusing on high performance, availability and security, that was first funded by a Chinese government-sponsored R&D program in 2002. It has been organized in a hierarchy model, including the basic kernel layer which is responsible for initializing the hardware and providing basic memory management and task management, the system service layer which is based on FreeBSD providing UFS2 and BSD network protocols, and the desktop environment which is similar to Windows. It has been designed to comply with the UNIX standards and is compatible with Linux binaries. In this paper, we discuss the motivation for this new BSD operating system. Then we introduce its new software infrastructure and some key techniques. Later, we present the Kylin and FreeBSD 5.3 performance comparison using the standard benchmarks. Finally we discuss the roadmap of the Kylin and its future direction.
