View-OS is a novel approach to the process/kernel interface. The semantics of each system call can be assigned process by process giving the user the right to decide which view of the system each process has to join. Each process can "see" a different file system structure, networking resources, processor, devices. Moreover some of the resources can be provided by the user him/herself, thus these resource can be private to the single process and are not known a priori by the system. Groups of processes can share the same view but this is just an optimization to share management methods.

For more information, see http://wiki.virtualsquare.org

UMView is a user-mode implementation of View-OS. Processes are run with a controlling daemon that captures all the system calls (at present using the ptrace() system call) and uses dynamically loadable modules to change their semantic.

This package contains a sub-module for umdev. umdev is contained in the main UMView package and allows virtualization of character and block devices. umdevtap creates a virtual TUN/TAP interface (i.e. /dev/net/tun). On the outer side, UMView opens a connection to a VDE switch.