[HN Gopher] Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scrat...
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       Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly
       language
        
       Author : ksec
       Score  : 146 points
       Date   : 2025-01-24 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sebastianmihai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sebastianmihai.com)
        
       | hsnewman wrote:
       | This does run on the MiSTer!
        
       | thebeardisred wrote:
       | To be clear: x86 assembly.
        
         | Narishma wrote:
         | To be even clearer, 16-bit real mode x86 assembly.
        
       | vdupras wrote:
       | That's an impressive collection of tools and apps they've built
       | there. And yet, it doesn't seem like they succumbed to the
       | temptation of making it self hosting! I guess the assembler would
       | need some work to bring it to parity with nasm... or bring the
       | whole source code closer to Snowdrop ASM!
        
       | DustinBrett wrote:
       | At least they provide an ISO/IMG. I still wish SerenityOS would
       | do this.
        
         | haunter wrote:
         | Serenity has nightly build images https://serenity-
         | builds.halves.dev/
        
           | mouse_ wrote:
           | But Serenity does not provide them.
        
       | pjmlp wrote:
       | Kudos, quite an impressive work.
       | 
       | V32, BASIC compiler. :)
       | 
       | Well we can make feature requests, I guess.
        
       | Tiberium wrote:
       | To anyone who's interested in such projects: also check MenuetOS
       | and KolibriOS (which is a fork of Menuet that diverged a looong
       | time ago). MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is
       | closed source.
        
         | spogbiper wrote:
         | also TempleOS if you'd prefer something more insane
        
           | mihular wrote:
           | Holy C, no less
        
             | nurettin wrote:
             | Holy C is hard to code without crashing Adam. If you type
             | the wrong kind of indirection, the whole OS freezes.
        
           | meifun wrote:
           | I was coming to the comments to write this reminds me of
           | Terry Davis, may be rest in peace. It might sound strange but
           | Terry provided me with inspiration and a reminder that
           | anything can be created or "Willed into existence".
        
           | ksp-atlas wrote:
           | ZealOS is TempleOS but with support for some modern
           | functionality, however this detracts from the proper TempleOS
           | experience
        
           | markus_zhang wrote:
           | I watched a few Terry's streams and TempleOS seems to be
           | something pretty fluid to use. You literally navigate in the
           | console, or whatever it is called, and can open any file the
           | current cursor points to.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | What are the latest cool ideas in OS design, both from a user's
       | viewpoint and from an OS hacker's viewpoint?
        
         | honestSysAdmin wrote:
         | The best answer, given the specific opposite edges you have
         | broadly specified, is                 https://redox-os.org/
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | > Most system components run in user-space on a microkernel
           | system. Because of this, bugs in most system components won't
           | crash the system/kernel.
           | 
           | It's funny because I want this when I write applications.
           | Each library should run in its own sandbox, and by default
           | they shouldn't be able to touch each other's data.
        
             | guerrilla wrote:
             | Something stupid I always wanted to do was to make an
             | object-oriented language where literally every single
             | object was a separate UNIX process. The naive
             | implementation would have horrendous context switching
             | overhead from the IPC, but maybe there's a clever and
             | elegant way to use shared memory...
        
               | drekipus wrote:
               | Practically Erlang
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | The original idea of Smalltalk was very much that :)
               | Sadly, hardware limitations of the time did not allow
               | Smalltalk to be implemented this way. Erlang was likely
               | the first generally available implementation if the idea.
               | (Now you write in Elixir for the same VM.)
        
               | iforgot22 wrote:
               | It seems like the reduced overhead of cooperative
               | multitasking (vs OS threads or even greenthreads) is so
               | important that people are writing code entirely
               | differently because of it. Like all those promise/future
               | frameworks in Java etc, or NodeJS which works this way
               | natively.
        
             | bboygravity wrote:
             | You're describing Elixir/Erlang?
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | Redox is Unix-like. It's not going to contain any
           | significantly new ideas.
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | Fuchsia has a crap load of wild ideas. Microkernel,
         | capabilities, weird app installation system (I think they're
         | trying to make apps more like websites).
         | 
         | https://rtic.rs/ is a pretty cool idea for an embedded RTOS
         | (sort of).
         | 
         | Honestly though there's still stuff in Plan 9 that is way more
         | advanced than what Linux does, e.g.
         | https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html
        
         | mycall wrote:
         | Genode [1] has an interesting approach to OS design as it is a
         | framework, but how much is assembly I don't know.
         | 
         | [1] https://genode.org
        
       | quanto wrote:
       | In a similar spirit, what are some progresses in performant
       | RTOSes for robotics? There seems to be relatively less interest
       | in that field.
       | 
       | No, ROS/ROS2 is not an operating system and is not what most
       | people call performant software.
        
         | doelie_ wrote:
         | Not an RTOS as is commonly understood but RTIC is nice. I think
         | originally developed for robotics.
         | 
         | https://rtic.rs
        
         | bigfishrunning wrote:
         | I think people who are serious about it run QNX or VxWorks.
         | Most robotics projects aren't serious and run Ubuntu
         | unfortunately.
        
       | Jotalea wrote:
       | Reminds me of TempleOS.
        
       | notorandit wrote:
       | Looks like menuetos, but 16 bit.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-24 23:00 UTC)