Re: kernel priorities

["Paul Southworth" <pauls@fir.cic.net> writes:]

>I might join this list but first I would like a wee bit more information
>about what this project is, what stage it is in with regard to a
>complete OS being developed, which platforms it is targeted at, and
>what the project goal/philosophy is.

Hmmm, well.

It's written with a fairly strong machine dependent/independent interface.
The independent stuff is written using spinlocks and sleeping semaphores
for a shared memory multiprocessor. The dependent part is for an i386 ISA
PC, although it's also been ported to a Japanese i386 box as well. I watch
the falling prices of multiprocessor PC's with great anticipation.

It's to the stage where you can boot it, log in, get a shell, list files,
compile a server, start it & mount it into your filesystem view, and use
it as a filesystem. That is, it's a reasonable self-hosting environment.
There are lots of common utilities which haven't been ported yet. But
many I just re-write, because...

We're not really interested in just doing UNIX all over again. In
fact, we're probably more closely related to Plan9. Our "make" is a
20K program, as opposed to the 355K GNU make. Is GNU broken? No. But
it's gratifying to experiment with simplicity. We follow POSIX.1
except when we have a specific reason to do otherwise. For instance,
errors are strings, not integers. Same for "signals", which we call
events. Still, for the most part it's a very familiar POSIX
environment and it's relatively easy to write or import code. We even
have a POSIX termios TTY interface, although much of the RS-232-oriented
tedium is unsupported.

There are various projects under way--an enhanced filesystem, a windowing
system, SCSI support, networking. Let me know if there are further details
which might be of interest.

                                                Regards,
                                                Andy Valencia
Received on Thu Nov 4 19:29:38 1993