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PetrOS - NT alternative?
Anonymous Coward writes "Trumpet Software, the company well known for its Trumpet Winsock package has been quoted in the
press as having their own version of a Win32 platform operating system, called PetrOS.
They are working out if they can release it without affecting MS's API intellectual property, from the
" They claim to have a 100kb microkernel, and run native NT executables. Anyone have more details?
It sounds like he's concentrated on getting the command line programs working and doesn't have a GUI yet. Since (I'm guessing) the GUI is the bulk of the work, this hardly counts as a Windows clone.
But, I actually like the approach. I wonder if the Wine folks wouldn't have made faster progress by following the same strategy. As it is now, there are lots of programs that "sort of do something" under Wine, but few useful ones that really work 100%. If the command line stuff worked WELL it might draw more developers to finish the job.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Those aren't part of the kernel though. They just provide API's to developers, that happen to implement some basic OS services (or what NT considers basic). The _real_ kernel is NTOSKRNL.EXE which on my work system (which I think is SP4) is 927,552 bytes (the bit that provides core system services like threading, process control, etc). Big compared to 100k, and huge compared to QNX Neutrino's 20k. I didn't want to refute your point - just provide a bit of accuracy.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Whatever this PetrOS thing is, I've got to hand it to Trumpet Software - they *really* made a difference 6 or 7 years ago with their Trumpet Winsock stack. Way before Microsoft acknowledged the Net's existence, Trumpet was there to help us poor non-Unix folks get on the web. One of the few shareware programs I actually paid for. :-) I wondered what they were doing these days... I'm not sure there's much of a market for a TCP/IP stack under Windows anymore.
I wonder if these folks even realize the implications... forget embedded (win32 is a bad idea for the embedded market anyway), think emulation -- win32 drivers and applications running with no overhead under any OS you like.
If this is legal (and you can bet MS will be trying hard to prevent it from being) then we may just have hit the point where even OS-specific software and drivers aren't OS-specific any more.
Of course the obvious MS response is to immediately make some incompatible API changes that break this new micro-OS, and patent them so far up their asses that a programmer couldn't extract them without reaching down their mouths with a plumber's snake. We'll have to see how the legal side of this evolves.
Inside the Native API
Inside Native Applications
Just out of curiosity, I took a look at native.exe (from the applications article) - the only dependency is on NTDLL.DLL, which weighs in at 347kb on my NT4 SP4 machine. Keep in mind that ntdetect.com, ntldr, hal.dll Though I have to admit the exports for it look a little weird... it looks like it implements a good chunk of the standard C library, and I want to know who thought exporting functions like "PropertyLengthAsVariant" were absolutely vital to the kernel...
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Easter eggs. If you hold down QCKRTISO whilst saying the Lord's Prayer backwards and tipping milk into your keyboard, it displays random pictures from Bill's family photo album. This is why stuff like GIF decoders have to be in kernel space under Windows NT; the "photo album" Easter egg requires them to work.