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MenuetOS, an Operating System Written Entirely In Assembly, Hits 1.0
angry tapir writes: MenuetOS, a GUI-toting, x86-based operating system written entirely in assembly language that's super-fast and can fit on a floppy disk, has hit version 1.0 — after almost a decade and a half of development. (And yes, it can run Doom). The developers say it's stable on all hardware with which they've tested it. In this article, they talk about what MenuetOS can do, and what they plan for the future. "For version 2.0 we'll mostly keep improving different application classes, which are already present in 1.00. For example, more options for configuring the GUI and improving the HTTP client. The kernel is already working well, so now we have more time to focus on driver and application side."
I remember futzing around with this little project 15 years ago. I am pleased to see that, not only is it still going strong, it's pretty remarkably modern.
Question: MenuetOS is entirely written in assembly? There's no traces of other languages, such as C?
Reply: nop
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And they'll have something that'd be marginally useable today.
#DeleteChrome
http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.t...
I might play with it, but if I can't use it for work, play is all it'll be.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
and their website looks like it's from 1995 as well!
So its not bloated and it is fast too? Seems appropriate. :-)
It fits on a floppy disk? We are in 2015, right? What is a 'floppy disk'?
Its a unit of storage space measurement equivalent to about 30 seconds of music from iTunes.
It fits on a floppy disk? We are in 2015, right? What is a 'floppy disk'?
It's an object lesson in using pure assembly. By the time you get anything useful done, technology has moved on.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Now that they've got this thing working, what would be really cool is if they could come up with a way of getting it to run on different processor architectures, in case x86 loses out to ARM in the long run.
I'm thinking maybe they could write some sort of abstraction layer whereby the instructions are originally written in some sort of higher level format, which could then be automatically turned into machine code for different hardware using a special program. You could do all sorts of things with that kind of system. I'm surprised nobody's thought of it before, actually.
Finally, a web site which doesn't try to overrun your browser with unnecessary rotating images and the latest and greatest shiny because some web designer said, "Why not?"
In other words, a web site which is useful.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm not reallyd sure that I understand that point. To me, thst would sound reasonable for educstionsl Ãr entertainment purposes, but are there any other meaningful reasons for writing an entire OS in assembler?
The entire OS would occupy about 1/3 of an Intel i7's cache. For ultra-high performance apps that might actually be useful.
Of course that includes user land apps and such so the footprint of the OS itself would probably be far smaller.
Wow, slashdot has come a long way from when I first started reading "chips & dips" in 1997. Even just 10 years ago, a story like this would have been met with enthusiasm and honest support, with a virtual pat on the back to the developers.
Today, a story like this is reduced to a mere platform for chest-beating (see the parent above). As in, "nevermind the lame story, look at me instead". Why in the world are you people even here?
From their own site:
So, if you want to port your own application to it, you'll need to rewrite it too. And you may need to do it in assembly — although there is, apparently, a C-compiler for MenuetOS it is billed as "low-level", which, I gather, means no (or limited) libc, and other exciting and challenging limitations.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's an object lesson in using pure assembly. By the time you get anything useful done, technology has moved on.
Not really. I have some computational code that I wrote in assembly 4 Pentium architectures ago. Every new architecture I run it against the C implementation, freshly recompiled with a current compiler. The assembly is still faster given all the hardware and compiler improvements. Now the performance improvement is getting much smaller but it is still a win.
And you're assembly is probably easy to beat with even pretty crappy SSE2 code.
Plenty of OSes have, over the course of history, been written in assembly.
And all of them proprietary, just like this one.
Menuet is cool, but I don't see a compelling reason to use closed source assembly unless it demonstrates some really crazy superpowers. It's also an odd case of a GPL codebase switching to a closed source license a couple years before it becomes useful.
Kolibri forked from the GPLed 32 bit branch, but I don't think it's pure ASM at all.
And you're assembly is probably easy to beat with even pretty crappy SSE2 code.
Apparently not by compilers.
You don't seem to understand the purpose of writing in assembly language. Its not to optimize for the current state of the art box. It is to get acceptable performance from old legacy boxes. Some assembly in the right spot(s) can make the difference between an old architecture making the cutoff in terms of acceptable performance, of being able to include that segment of the market in your minimum system requirements.
My point is that such optimizations for the sake of the old boxes doesn't necessarily do any harm to the new boxes. That worrying about future architectures is a red herring of sorts.
it grows to 2.5"?
Or a $10 ARM chip, programmed in C.
of assembly language on the desktop? will it run linux?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
and their website looks like it's from 1995 as well!
So its not bloated and it is fast too? Seems appropriate. :-)
I can state with authority that in 1995, there were exactly zero fast websites. Of this I am 100% certain.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Hey buddy, ever wait around near the nurses station at a hospital? Women can and do tell dirty jokes all the time.
Doom is shown as an icon on the desktop in the various screenshots found on the project site, but indeed, Quake is the game running in a window.