Slashdot Mirror
V2 OS
Blizzard-ahb writes "You may want to have a look at this 'still has that new car smell' operating system.
V2 OS is written entirely in ASM for x86 processors and aims to be the fastest OS around. Just needs some developers to start coding some applications for it.
It weighs in at a massive 37KB download. There is a SDK availible for download that uses C, or you could write in ASM as well. Did I mention that it was free?"
There was nothing particularly funny in the consept of of your statement, however, the way you said it just made me laugh. (You should have said (The moderators are so on crack, it hurts. , removing the 'high' part. oh well.)
and it's score 3 now...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
They seem to be pushing it as if it will actually go into wide use.
It's a cool toy, but it is a toy, and it's not presented as one. All that stuff about performance is nonsense, because the overhead of even the current piggy in-use software isn't a big deal. What's the point of reducing task-switching overhead from 0.3% to 0.01%? You still gain less than 0.3%
Also, this would be a much, much cooler toy if it came with source. Why do you want a toy OS, except to tinker with its guts?
OTOH, it's good to be reminded now and then just how small code can be. I love coding in assembly and seeing just how much I can fit into a KB. Size-limited programming contests rule, especially game programming, especially with exotic platforms (nothing to stretch the old brain like learning to program an Atari 2600).
It really sounds like these guys wrote themselves a rather large and difficult to maintain and debug OS. That's what they said about Linux when it first came out.
PS: Hey, BTW, does anyone know of any attempts to put Linux on cell phones? (Just cause we can!) I've been looking around but haven't seen any info out there.
dude-- that's what EMULATORS are for!
-_-
i wonder how difficult it would be to write an assembler that translated between machine codes. If it's at all possible, i'd say it should be a _lot_ easier to go from a heavily CISC chip like the x86 to a heavily RISC one like the PPC than the other way around. But then again i wouldn't know-- i know next to nothing about assembly, and i don't know how things like different registers affect the basic way the code is written, never mind instruction sets.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
it's not portable, because it's pointless, because it's not Linux. Yet you seem to like Star Wars crap made out of legos...
... makes sense to me ;-)
But see, lego[s] are portable, are mostly-pointless except for creativity, and share the force with linux
"it's you, inside yourself"
asm isn't hard at all. It's your head.
Compilers still make shit code.
Any idea where I can find info on PPC assembler? I seem to not be able to find reference to instructions or compilers...
Well, assembly is *NOT* hard to code with. Only the horrendous x86 architecture makes it seem so (Looking at all the exceptions and modes of the x86 makes my head spin). Basically, the x86 has a register set which is probably similar to a pocket calculator. [Honestly, certain instructions faster in say, AX rather than BX/CX/DX? Trying to optimize this is quite difficult. The 386 is popular because it generalized a few addressing modes across more registers (very helpful)]. Of course, MMX is a real mess (using the floating point register/stack for MMX manipulation, and having to reinitialize the registers if you want to do FP instructions (Intel tutorials)).
There *WERE* processors of the era that have a much nicer architecture (like the 68000), and many more registers [wow. 8 32-bit data registers, and 7+1 32 bit address registers...]. Yes, I'm biased. I love coding in assembly on a 68k processor. And I've found out how to code in assembly on a nice HC11 microcontroller [great fun! Register deprived, yes, but nothing too complicated, and very simple to code for].
Intel recognized this, which is why the later processors (Pentium II, Pentium III, etc) have more hardware-mapped registers that the hardware remaps to the x86 registers. (These registers can't be altered from software - they for out of order execution, etc).
People do program in assembly still, like Steve Gibson, and a link off of him has someone who *TRIED* to do DDE, and gave up after seeing its complexity. Still amazes me to see that SpinRite 5 is only 100k or so.
hello people. I've just poured hot grits down my pants to celebrate computing science teleporting itself backwards 20 years by coding an operating system in assembler when there is no obvious benefit and when C could have achieved the same result in quicker time !!!
-- Linux and grits down my pants. Does it get any better?
Do you have a list of URLs to dump on us depending on the story?
"Hmmm let me see... the story is_______, what do I have in my URL pantry to cook up?"
This is all a joke to you isn't it? Post comments you know will get moderated up, as you said in the past, and try to get as many points as you can? HEY! We'd like a real discussion please, not this type of behavior. I'm sure though you'll deny it though. Why do I bother? Oh well I guess.
The site is Slashdotted heavily, but I downloaded the OS itself from the mirror some nice person posted above.
Note to the Mac users out there: yes, it does work in Virtual PC (though I needed to use a real PC to install the thing, it booted in VPC as well). I'd imagine it'll work with Bochs or MESS as well.
It's very pretty as command-lines go (though Darwin has the prettiest command-line I've ever seen, as if that matters at all). I don't see much use for it, but since I couldn't get into the site I could be missing something. It would have been nice if they had provided a PCX file on their demo disk to go with their PCX viewer, though. As it is I'm not sure how I'm supposed to put one on a V2-formatted disk so I can run the viewer.
Uh exactly what babble is this you're spewing?
"People in the lame NT world?" There is quite a large number of intelligent NT users, much like there is a large number of clueless Linux users. Save your self styled eliteness for someone who cares.
Secondly think for a minute, if people followed your suggestion and stuck to a single "Free OS" you'd be in front of a *BSD machine right now instead of your precious Linux. Interesting thought, ne?
That sure explains how I just ran GLQuake 1 on a Voodoo 1 with a GL minidriver...
I am a rabbit, patiently lathering my anus with my soft sof tongue. I feel a need for Natalie Portman and Drew Barrymore. I do not have a craving Dave Barry, however. At least not his body. His books, well maybe. In any case, Here i go running across the road.
(waits for the splat)
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
I WANT TO JOIN OPEN SOURCE CAROLINA KASTING
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
Exactly. It's yet another OS, and it's not open source. (I'm taking your word for this, their site appears to be /.ed and I can't check to look for source.)
// booted in only four seconds, off of a floppy no less, and the OS was under 8k!) then why would people switch to it and code apps for it when they'd have to reinvent the wheel just to eventually be where we already are.
Bear with me on this. If an application isn't open source, only that application and the users of it will suffer. If an OS isn't open source, all applications and all users suffer.
The OS is the one part that *must* be open source. If it's not, the whole house of cards might as well be built on prime Florida landfill.
And, why do we need another OS? This one seems to have one benefit, it's the easiest way to ship some piece of software that just plans on taking over the hardware as soon as it's loaded. If I was writing software to turn a PC into a network diagnostic unit or a robotics control station for an automated drill, this would be fine.
But for anything else, the network effect is the biggest problem. When Linux came out, it had TCP/IP networking and was a unix-like. You could network it with other OSes and didn't have to learn a new OS paradigm to use it. Does this 37k OS support that?
And, why do we need a new OS? Seriously. If this doesn't offer any improvements (other than size and speed, but my Apple
And then, even if they had a reason, why would they pick a closed source OS?
You are right, and the "Nerds" have spoken. The previous postings have pointed out the flaws in writing an operating system in hard to maintain assembly, writing for a processor that is in very few embedded devices, and the uphill battle the OS faces.
A lesser site would be talking about how 1337/Kool these programmers are, and predicting this OS might take over the world. The readers of Slashdot expect more. The thoughtful discussion that is taking place right now is a prime example.
Sig goes here
Uhh, code bloat, yes. But instability?? No way. It's WAY easier to screw up using assembler than using C, and in turn it's way easier to screw up using C than using some higher-level language like Lisp or Smalltalk.
You're not a real man if you can't write asm code.
These people will have a quite large market, other then the 8051 and 68k series quite a number of embedded designs (non DSP) use i386. This happened simply because dev tools and workstations were cheaply available for the last 15 years. Embedded systems are also less likely to change hardware. This operating system if well designed will have a long and useful life. Faster is often better with embedded controllers. Regards
Well, the app wasn't optimized for a cyrix, You'd probably notice more of an advantage on a pentium or similar
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
True, i can see and understand this, for IO ports one should be able to say, give me access to io ports in the range of xxxx-yyyy, if they are not hooked by the os (eg: so i cant take over the PIC and reprogram it, etc).
for things like memory mapped perhiperals, i'd say device drivers required etc ;)
I still think, having no memory protection is a feature.
I think if you want an Os that engineers can plug in custom boards, a protected os may not be the way to go, BUT after testing when the boards are in practice i think a protected os would be the way to go ^_^....
The pros/cons for having memory/app/io protection etc, _imo_, outweigh those for not having protection.
Write your Own Operating System [FAQ]!
no sig for you
HAHA That was pretty funny :)
But the keyboard is so small! I never got used to typing with both just two keys.
--
IMHO assembly is the right choice when it comes to speed, as i'm involved in game development and most of the time the extra speed is mandatory for complex algorithms and hardware tricks, but games are developed for common hardware and most of the time they don't really need to be very flexible.
:)
But in the OS side, speed is definitely not as important as a clever design. If these guys want their OS to lift off they better be very thoughtful, because it doesn't make any sense to code the fastest hack if you can't really extend its capabilities or program applications easily. I think a good example of what does a well-built, small, fast AND portable OS look like is QNX. OS, GUI, Web server, browser and some more stuff fits in a floppy, and most of it is written in C/C++.
Personally, I hate coding the same thing twice for two different platforms, I really like the idea of using my code for more than one thing, and that's what standards like ANSI C and POSIX are all about.
These guys might as well win some Assembly '00 award with amazing code like the V2, but let's be serious, assembly should be used only when needed.
That said, coding in assembly is really fun (except when you have to explain your code either to other person or to yourself after some weeks of working at something else
--------------------
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
There was RSX-11, RT-11, DOS, IAS, RSTS, MUMPS and UNIX. It was probably IAS, a timesharing system if my memory is correct.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The helpful answer: Try the Motorola PowerPC 601 User's Manual to learn the instruction set and architecture. This is the definitive reference, nobody bothers to write anything after this. A PPCAsm compiler comes w/ Metrowerks' Discover Programming.
The discouraging answer: If you don't already own CodeWarrior, you probably have some other stuff to learn first.
The distrustful answer: Why is your homepage www.ms.com? Maybe I shouldn't tell you this...
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
That's not necessarily true. I've slipped comments into machine code before. Just make sure you JMP over them!
(Why put comments in machine code, you ask? Usually just to say "Hi!" or make a joke to cause the person looking at your raw machine code laugh.)
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Dont be so jumpy for the first post.
But, before I forget, FIRST REPLY TO FIRST POST!!!!
(just kidding).
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Well, assembly is somewhat human readable... a quick example for the 8086 processor: First, in assembler, we want to add the value 4096 to a varible named var: add [var],4096 Assume var is a pointer to a two-byte value, the address within it's particular data segment being B604h Can be written in most assemblers, when translated to hex code it looks like: 81 06 04 B6 00 10 Or in binary: 1000000010000011000000100101101100000000000010000 Which is even less portable than assembly (hell, with the x86 series, all the bytes are swapped because the chips are little endian) Hope this helps.
Your post was funny as hell
Thank you.
(licking their asses?)
As I was writing, I looked up and my cat was devotedly licking his ass. He's nice as hell, but he's not very bright. In fact, my characterization of the rabbits was based as much on him as on the AC. I also forgot to mention in the post that I lifted the rabbit metaphor from Hunter S. Thompson. He did it better than me, of course.
Without his work, I'd probably know a lot less Perl than I do now.
I don't doubt that he's far more technically accomplished than I am, nor that he's done some (or even many) worthwhile things, but not being a Perlist, all I've seen of him has been his public outbursts. Take for for example his advocacy of the "Demon Penguin" thing. He was demanding that the community "punish" Richard Stallman for the "GNU/Linux" thing. He wanted Stallman humiliated and brought to heel. This is childish. For God's sake, however endlessly annoying Stallman may be, he operates by trying to persuade people to agree with him. Christiansen operates by trying to kick people into submission, which annoys me a lot more. Christiansen has the same right to shoot his mouth off as Stallman does, but what he says doesn't tell me anything good about him. IIRC the project to replicate the GNU utils in Perl was similarly motivated. In the course of that discussion here on Slashdot, somebody posted some links to a couple of Christiansen's posts on a (the?) Perl mailing list, where he displayed a genuinely monumental self-regard (and he also posted an insufferably arrogant and rude but logically sound and convincing defense of useless time-wasting projects like the Perl/GNU utils thing -- which is why he popped into my head here). He seems to be a bit of a flamer in general. Also in the course of that discussion, he posted some bizarre screed wherein he tried to "prove" that Perl is a compiled language, in response to people who say it's interpreted. Apparently that really gets under his skin, though I'm not sure why anybody would care. It does what it does, and if that's good, it's good, regardless of what semantic sophistries you weave around it. It's just the most meaningless, perfect non-issue I've ever seen. There are some practical respects in which Perl behaves like an interpreted language, whether it's byte-compiled or not. One of these is the fact that a Perl program minimally requires far more elaborate runtime support than a compiled executable (minimally) does. Persuading people to call it "compiled" won't fix that. It's not a semantic issue, it's how the software works. Nevertheless, he seems to be locked into the "one true language" mentality.
Oh, yeah, Christiansen also objects stridently to GNU-style long commandline options ("--help" etc) on the grounds that they make UNIX "impure" or something, and presumably they lead to the sin of self-documenting scripts. He seems to be one of these self-appointed Old-Fashioned UNIX Gurus who thinks the users need to be kept in their place. In view of the currently perceived need to keep network protocols open by propagating non-MS operating systems and other software, "keeping the users in their place" is in fact a recipe for helping the more depressing elements of the proprietary software world to keep us in our place. It's not just mean-spirited and pointless; it's self-destructive as well. Friendly interfaces aren't inconsistent with good software (to the contrary!) and unless you're running a BBS in your basement, stupid users pay your bills. We're asking them to invite us to the party. When we get there, let's not shit on the rug and belch, even though "in principle" that may be the right thing to do.
You can do *anything* in asm that you can do in a HLL. Here are some facts... 1.)ASM is easier to write 2.)ASM is eaiser to maintain 3.)ASM is easier to organize 4.)ASM isn't full of useless bloated libraries 5.)ASM owns your hide 6.)ASM gives me an erection 7.)ASM is addicting 8.)ASM isn't too bad for your health
>>even though Linux appears to be out selling the Mac, quiet an achievement for something that can be had for free...
Quite an unclear and ambiguous statement.
1. Linux is an operating "the Mac" can be interpreted as either a. a family of computers that sell for anywhere from $899-$3499 or b, an operating system that sells for $99 unless it comes bundled with one of the computers from (a.).
Or I suppose that you could mean computers with the OS installed for both, which I'd LOVE to see documented by a reputable source.
You can't compare sales of an OS to sales of hardware. If you mean the MacOS you must specify that.
2. Define "out selling" do you mean a. selling more copies, or b. selling more in terms of $$$.
Since linux CDs can be had for as cheap as $1.99 if you sell 100 of them, it's not the same volume of cash as 3 copies of the MacOS.
If you want to consider "out selling" to be simply selling more CD's containing the OS(without the hardware), I wouldn't be surprised if linux was "outselling" MS Windows products.
There are other ways that your statement could be interpreted which I shall not cover because I don't want ot take the time, however if I've misinterpreted your intent or meaning, please let me know.
LK
--Disclaimer(I use Linux, Windows, and the MacOS both at work and at home.)
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Has three messages on it about how great V2 is...all of them posted within a few minutes of each other...and they're the only three in that section...strange, no? --Daniel Myers myers1@no_spam.concentric.net
I had the honor of learning assembly from him (I'm a student at UCR). The guy knows everything there is to know about almost everything. You may also want to check out RATC, a pretty neat set of macros for C.
He has been in the business for a long time and knows a lot about the history of the industry.
His classes are a mixture of computing history and actual programming. It was the only CS class I attended constantly just because it was so damn interesting.
A lot of his students don't like him because he is so demanding, but you will definately learn a lot by reading anything he has written.
I heard that he is currently teaching his assembly language class using an assembler that he wrote himself.
Also, any budding assembly programmers probably want to check out the UCR Standard Library, also available from http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
This makes programming assembly a lot easier.
All coders need this book, it is the most comprehensive book on assembly ever written. Even if you dont want to program an x86 architecture, the theory (optimization, memory alignment, etc.) still applies.
Compilers were made because people are too lazy to write *real* code.
isn't that the point of good COMPILERS these days?
Yes, if you actually followed the link, it is free... its in the two lines of text on the main page...
:)
V2_OS offers more speed, expandability, and hardware control for adventurous projects and easy programming FOR FREE!
or were you just going for first post?
BeOS is highly portable... it can't be built on that much asm.
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
...throw it on a floppy and try it in VMWare
Just did that in VMware 1.1.2. Boots, but freezes whrn the "terminal screen" comes up, and trashes the screen. The boot process is pretty fast, though, even under the virtual machine.
Actually, you can just write a gcc machine specification on a supported machine, cross-compile gcc and whatever else you need for the new machine, and then figure out a way to initially load your new executables. No assembly required, except for the poor sap that makes the gcc spec work for the new machine.
For those of you who would like some history, check out this story. It's one of hackerdom's great stories about the last Real Programmers who hacked in assembly using vi and a toothpick....
Why not simply email the admins of these sites and ask them if they would like (1 Slashdot to go ahead and link to them, (2 Slashdot to not link to them, mention them, etc. or (3 Slashdot to mirror them temporarily. Seems like that could be helpful in minimizing the obscene amount of traffic a simple mention of a site on Slashdot can produce.
37 kiloBytes! Holy Crap! Are they making a version for the c64, too?
...so porting versus rewriting isn't that big of a deal.
- Schematics for the new IBM PowerPC Open Platform Reference Design
- The comp.sys.m68k FAQ: info about one of the first and most hacked on (and loved) Unix microprocessors. Cheap and well-documented.
- A picture of Ingo Cyliax's 68030 workstation, the CS335.
Sorry about the lousy formatting in the first post, btw.C code -> Preprocessed C code -> assembly code -> machine code -> linked code
.asm file you make turns into a seperate object. by linking code, you can write diffrent functions in diffrent files, and re-use them for other projects. With C, you can use header files, and other things, but linking is still used. There is no diffrence between 'linked code' and 'machine code'
No:
C code -> macnine code
asm code -> macnine code
When you link code, you connect the parts of the code you've already writen together
When you're doing asm programing, each
Assembly is just a human readable form of machine code, There is no reason for a compiler to create assembly, beacuse humans arn't going to be reading it. When you see the asm output in a debug window, its actualy just been unassembled
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If you want, you can put comments in the output of a C compiler. just do somthing like this:
main(){ "Hello, this is a comment!!" cout "This program file has a comment!!"; }
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I have to agree with the above post. Why is it whenever someone is doing something different and little bit out on the edge so many negitive comments pop up if its not specifically Linux. While some fair negitive comments were made (That coding effort should move towards embedded platforms) many more where "Why waste time on that its not Linux, its dead ix86 hardware, blah blah"
Why arn't more people supporting stuff like this? It keeps options open for hackers who do want to play with OS assembly on the ix86, who might find Linux not their cup of tea or who might have ideas about how to do ASM portably .
So why not show some support and have a look at the work (once the server gets a rest) for this and other 'alternative' projects!
WeirdArms
If you want, you can put comments in the output of a C compiler. just do somthing like this:
main(){
"Hello, this is a comment!!"
cout << "This program file has
a comment!!"; }
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
That I've noticed. When I did a program in VB (yes, yes I know, but it was easy and speed wasn't an issue [no one will notice if it took 1 second or .01 seconds to do what it had to do]), I spent far more time managing the windows than trying to do the actual code...
Something like 10% did the actual work, 90% just to manage the windows/buttons/etc portion.
Let the little bitches waste their moderator points on us... fuel for the fire baby, fuel for the fire... I just ate Slashdot's balls and damn were they tasty...
try making it clear that you're joking, like putting another paragraph at the bottom, and using a ;)
It's hard to tell who really is that dumb, unless they give you some kind of clue that they have a clue. I didn't think about the fact that you weren't AC, and I bet most people didn't either.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
> When you have 512K of flash to store all your applications, and MAYBE
> another 256K of RAM, you have to squeeze everything that you can bare
> out of your software.
Spoiled brat! You'll have ample justification to bitch when you'll have to fit your controlling program into 2K bytes of ROM, whilst having only 127 bytes of RAM to play with...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
Hey, I can't make it work on me puter! Don't think it likes having non-dos stuff... Or maybe it's the SCSI and multiprocessor setup... But then again, maybe it just didn't work. Anyone else have any problems?
Explain. Linux advocates are often critisized for their "one OS, one world - but my OS" mentality. The GPL helps them, because fragmentation, while plausable, is difficult. With Linux's "culture" very quick to attack anything people assume the majority may be queasy about, its rather the other way around. The BSDL has created fragmentation, or rather helped competing product development time through their code, which improves the entire community. Windows uses BSD code, most UNIX OSes use BSD code, etc. You even say "*BSD" meaning all bsds. There is no single free BSD OS that has become popular while the rest perish, where as with the GPL only Linux is noticed, others fall through the cracks.
So I'd say if you want a single OS, Linux is it. Its multi-platform, advocates pressure venders to ensure their product (OS, hardware, etc) is compatable, etc. Linux tries to be everything to everyone.. OSes like Windows, MacOS, BeOS, BSDs, etc. generally first try to be the best for one, and keep the rest satisfied.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Seems that the majority of readers are peeved when
Slashdot posts news that doesn't conform to an
X86-dominated society.
Now, here's some happy news about a new X86 OS
and it's getting knocked for not being portable to
other architectures.
Why are you unhappy? Are you jealous? Insulted?
I run an Amiga, which comes standard with an OS
written mostly in fast assembly. Apps for it can
be developed in a large number of languages, with
abundant resources for further assembly coding.
It doesn't have virtual memory. This means
that large apps don't freeze my system for a minute
upon closing, while they frantically chug my hard
drive. It also means that applications must make
efficient use of memory, because once all your RAM
is used up, you're done.
But apps wouldn't do that anyway, since they all
have an extremely small memory footprint. Chances
are that I can load my email program, web browser,
telnet app, irc client, and mp3 player in as much
time as it takes for most to load Netscape Communicator.
And in half as much memory. And with a tenth of the
disk chugging.
And since they're all in memory at the same time,
my hard drive won't even be touched as I rapidly
switch between all the different programs.
Oh! And I don't have memory protection. This means
that application developers have to be very careful
in debugging their software. They have to make sure
that there are no leaks, no stray pointers.
Yeah, in a system with no memory protection, software
_can_ overwrite important areas of memory.
But that's when you delete that software.
Yes, grits!
want to look cool as i walk down the street with my open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore in my laptop.
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as our lives are done in watermelon sugar. And grits, of course.
natalie portman and drew barrymore "grab" me
They "grab" me, too -- in fact they're grabbing me right now!
Well, maybe not. But if they were, I'd show them your post and I just know they'd go for the grits the moment they saw it.
i want to scratch the itch they produce in me.
Please don't scratch your itch in public. It's rude. When you do that, the lice jump off.
i want to "get it."
I understand that you want to "get it" (after all, I was a young man myself once), but you probably won't be getting any for a few years yet. Be patient, and remember not to scratch. By the way, if you pour some nice warm grits down your pants, that will soothe the itch and you'll feel much better. Natalie and Drew will appreciate that, I'm sure.
the plural of OS is OSii ?
Does that mean that the pural of "system" is Systei?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
On the Cyrix 150 the assembly language version of mpg123 was about 5% faster than the pure gcc 2.8.1 version. Now on the celeron 550 with egcs 2.95.2 forget it. It makes me wonder what else the guy could have written if he didn't spend all that time debugging assembly language.
jeesum, he calls a lot of attention no matter what he says... look at this...
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=5, Interesting=2, Informative=2, Overrated=1, Total=10.
that's just one of many recent comments that's been moderated down. People stop wasting so many moderation points, just because of -who- you have personal gripes against!
Rob, (if you're reading this), can you make it so when you're a moderator signatures and authours are not visible? I think it would help all involved.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
why is slashdot illuminating this OS when it has yet to post a story about the new pineapple syphilitic pudding operating system that I have recently developed. Let me recite some of the technological innovations, lest you think I am merely fooling.
1) Coded entirely in new high-level object-oriented langauge called Nestea.
2) Supports one type (called OneType). This should simplify programming as it obviates need to think about which messy type to use to hold an integer or a linked list. Each OneType object is 17,294 bytes which has raised eyebrows in some circles. We have a supercool garbage collector that will make sure wasted memory is instantly reclaimed
3) Extensive API provided for developers. Already contains fibonnaci and bubblesort functions. Currently working on code to traverse a link (bi-directionally)
4) Works on every chip in existence. We achieve this by not making any assumptions about the underlying architecture. We have a huge virtual table which attempts to execute code against 1 of several hundered virtual chipsets. Each time we run into an exception, we just attempt to re-execute code against the next entry in the table. This may cause a slight drop in execution speed. There is no current method to tell the difference between an acceptable exception or a show-stopper so we ask all developers to make sure that their code is perfect.
There are numerous other things that I could detail. But I will share those if and when slashdot posts an article about this stunning technological revolution.
C{EIFO}O of Pineapple, Syphilitic Pudding, Inc.
Signal 11 this behavior is getting old. Please stop!
Perhaps he is just trying to prove a point...
So it must be Belgium then...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
They use a zilog(sp?) z80. It was a pretty popular chip back in the day, Gameboy, NES atari... I think the apple two used one as well (but I'm not quite sure).
the z80 lives on today in the embeded market, a lot of people know how to code in it (All calculator games for the ti8x's are writen in pure assmbly).
Ahh... 8bit programing : )
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You know, if it was coded in assembly, you have all the _source_ they have when you download the executable. Mind you, it doesn't have the comments or aliases, but hey, assembly code's damn near impossible to read anyway, even with those.
-----------
"
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
(You know, I'll feel the pin-prick when I get moderated -1 Off Topic and my Karma goes down, so don't do it lightly ;)
i want to open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore. i would look cool as i ran across the road with my open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore in my laptop.
"look how cool he is as he runs across the road with his open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore in his laptop, " casual passers by would say.
"yes, i am, indeed, cool as i run across the road with my open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore in my laptop!"
"we will all be handsomely rewarded!"
"yes!!"
thank you.
We're tired of your blanket boming for points. You don't need accolades anymore. Why?
Just because _you_ think nothing 'notable'would be contributed doesn't mean you should post off topic.
Assembly being hard to debug/write is just a myth. The only downside of assembly language is it's not portable and has a sharp learning curve. Asides from that assembly is not just history.
May I suggest that you get a copy of Computer Organization & Design by Patterson Hennessy. It takes a bottom down approach to teaching how a computer actually works using the MIPS as an example. It covers everything you need to know to write good asm programs including exception handling, pipelining and any other random thing you may encounter. Plus you can get the SPIM simulator to test your programs for free.
It's coded in ASM?
It's de facto open source.. Just disassemble...
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
Since this OS is so small, Just think about the Idea of a NetBoot of this OS. even over a 28.8 modems (hehe) this could be booted in a very short time, If this was run over a Desently fast connection it would be faster to boot over that than on a Floppy.
I checked it out, interesting, but not much of a demonstration. I'm sure more will come of it. But I ask, what makes it so different/better than say, QNX. Heck, QNX has a wopping 32k kernal, with TRUE PROTECTED MEMORY, and a multitude of librarys and extensions for GUI interface, posix, distributed processing, ect. ect. (I wonder which is overall a faster performer)
I remember reading in some faq that I can't seem to find right now that they said that they used assembly when they needed the speed.
Of course, I could've been halloucinating.
bye
Dan
I think that programmers should take a little time and learn enough ASM as to not be completly stuck when the compiler or debugger lies to them.
Yep, that's right compilers, debuggers, bytecode interpreters, all of them can lie to you. ASM code and a debugger stepping through ASM code can still lie to you but it rare enough that in a ~12 year career I can think of only two times where ASM code lied. C/C++ compilers lie so often that it's not worth remembering.
So learn a little ASM. When someone gets stuck and you flip the debugger to disassembly and point out the problem right away, you will awe and amaze your co-workers.
A couple of C++ problems that are easy to see by stepping through the code in assembly:
1) Crushed VTables.
2) Multiple inheritence problems (what? a cast can change the value of a pointer)
3) Optimized build debugging (shudder!)
4) STL Unsafe iterator problems
5) A lot of C++ compilers have problems with temporary objects.
6) Believe it or not MS C++ has some problems with ternary operators.
Learn ASM -- saves time later.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
-T
I used to know this guy, Henry .. he wrote an asm-based os called synthetix.. him and some researcher, carlton pu .. either way I think this is the url : http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/synthetix/ I never saw much about it.. but apparently they wrote it out of asm for m68k's .. was supposed to be amazingly fast for it's time
"And how can this be? For he is the
The orgional quake, the accellerated versions came later.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And this will be current for how many months before the Itanium comes out? It amazes me that they're selling this.
;v>
;v>
Maybe it'll be a few more years
Besides, x86Asm isn't that much better than compiler-generated code on a Pentium II/III. Microcode, followed by rearrangement of the internal instructions, destroys any of the loving care that was put into writing this. On a 286, it should really fly, tho.
And if it's a few K, I can't imagine it provides too many services. I wrote a sprite graphics engine in PPCAsm, and was surprised by how much space it takes up. Once you unroll a few loops, the bytes start adding up.
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Spoiled brat!!!
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
this might come into full swing on the torrent of x86 instruction set compatible embedded systems. thanks to all for the effort.
That's reaching a bit, of course...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Seems to me you could be a lot more productive writing interesting comments than lambasting who I think is slashdot's most consistently interesting poster.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
How do you see into the future like that? Give me the winning loto numbers NOW!! please?
god help me, i actually did that once...
If you have MacOS, try http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/Fantasm/fan t.html. They've got a good assembler, and it comes with great tutorial documentation (it'll teach you 68K assembly too, if you want).
If you don't have MacOS, I'm not sure where to look. Motorola's and IBM's Websites are probably good places to start, though.
blame it on Microsoft. You know, the company you throw your money to.
I don't like to code c/c++ with all it's bloated libraries and user-friendly bullshit.. :)
you will be handsomely rewarded.
thank you.
Wow. so spacious! (keeping in line with this current thread)
Wait until you program for a system with either:
2k of ROM and a whopping *36* bytes of RAM (Basic Stamp II) or a nice 1k [= 1024 instructions] rom, 68 bytes of RAM (common PIC, I belive the 16F84). Of course, those who know PIC programming know we have a whopping 37 instructions with which to play with. >GG. Amazingly, the project fit in 5k of RAM (not counting the features we needed to add.)
Then again, having to do a processor in VHDL on a FPGA must be fun [my friends designed a processor (~10 instructions, 16 bits each), with "rom" of 256 instructions, and ram of 256 bytes... Even more fun.].
Do you not remember running Quake1 before they had any hardware accelerationa vailable? I know I remember, GlQuake didn't come until after Quake had been out for a little while..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
first, its NOT free. you dont get ALL the source. so its closed source. you get some example code and some binaries.
second, it has NO memory protection. NONE! (if you read their forum, in development, one of the v2 guys confirmed the question). no memory protect, so your app can crash the kernel (sounds like a mac os or dos)... Having no memory protection means you have to give 100% trust to all your programs + programmers to do the correct thing. heh and we all know that means nothing in the real world.
sounds crap. ok, so its written in 100% asm. whoa. big deal. if your into hobbyist os (check my FAQ!!:), there are lots of startup OSii in 100% asm. nothing to get wet knickers over.
(i found it VERY strange to see this story on slashdot, if you read the OS dev newsgroups or follow OSii boards, little osii like this are announced *ALL* the time at an alarming rate. there really isnt anything special about this one)
but.. BUT! Creating OSii isnt everyones cup of tea and its good to see people still doing it ;)
mebbe i should make a distinction here about hobbyist os' and main stream type os. ala v2 vs linux. talk about apples and oranges.
linux has grown way past being a hobbyist os to a main stream os some time ago.
vsta + tinyos strikes me as being stuck inbetween, vsta more hobbyist than tinyos....
anyway.
if you do have an itch to scratch, you can check my faq for basic questions + answers on several os dev topics...
Write your Own Operating System [FAQ]!
no sig for you
x86 is available for embedded systems. Someone will have to check on this, but I thought Motorola had a pager out that ran on an embedded 386/486. One of those clam-shell monsters with the keyboard.
Anony-mouse
Dude. Assembly isn't hard. Learning assembly is hard because it's *different*. Once you learn assembly for one chip another is a synch. Assembly wouldn't have source files that were too huge because then the authors of the code wouldn't know wtf they're doing. Please don't speak out against assembly if you don't already *know* it.
Using linux for the sake of not using windows is just as stupid. how stupid are you?
NetBSD just claims that - few of the ports are complete and really work. Yeah, I suffered three years with a company that chose NetBSD because it was soooo portable and then wound up having to port NetBSD to architectures that Linux was already solid on - and many features of the NetBSD ports were lacking.
First of all, assembler is not obsolete. People incapable of writing a non-trivial app in any given language are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject -- not that that ever stops them. If someone tries to tell you that assembly language is obsolete, the best way to shut them up is to ask them how many years of assembly experience they have. If that fails, ask them to name even one algorithm that is only possible in assembly language.
(Frankly, I'd be surprised if even one quarter of the AC's dissing this project can program in any language.)
Secondly, I can see plenty of uses for an OS like this one, not the least of which would be embedded systems, to say nothing of learning something about low-level hardware interfaces. Somebody has to write that kind of code, even if it isn't kewl enough for all these l33t HaX0r d00ds.
Thirdly, the growing me-too strains of Linux "world domination" are really starting to piss me off. Free software is, first and foremost, about choice and control. If Linux ever actually does dominate the world, it will have become the Enemy, and it will be necessary to destroy it in the same way Microsoft is being destroyed. Popularity is not a measure of quality; often, it is just an index of trendoid mediocrity.
Finally, not just with respect to V2 but with respect to all creative endeavors: If you think you can do better, go do it or shut up. Anyone can be a critic; relatively few, it seems, are contributors.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Um sure...
1.)ASM is easier to write.
Opinion.
2.)ASM is eaiser to maintain.
Opinion. And an uncommon one, at that.
3.)ASM is easier to organize.
Opinion.
4.)ASM isn't full of useless bloated libraries.
You have to WRITE the libraries for it. I just don't feel any great desire to implement things like printf() for the fun of it. Waste of time.
5.)ASM owns your hide.
Yep yours, and the person who has to maintain your code after you leave.
6.)ASM gives me an erection.
Congratulations.
7.)ASM is addicting.
I think it can be useful, when certain routines are written and called from other languages. Few cases justify writing an entire program in assembly these days.
8.)ASM isn't too bad for your health.
Well I guess 1 out of 8 isn't bad...
Oh, and let's not forget that in many cases, modern day compilers can do a better job of optimizing code on their own, than you can do with hand-written assembly. There are of course notable exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.
G'day.
God, I hope small apps come back into fashion.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Try to vary it a bit. It's not a bad riff, but I'm almost certain that this post here is copy'n'pasted from another previous one, IIRC in the Fox/Linux discussion. It's funnier if you keep going somewhere with it.
By the way, do you read McSweeney's? There's something about your flat, deadpan style and the way you repeat yourself that reminds me of them. "You will be handsomely rewarded!" is for example a McSweeney's-ish phrase. That's not a bad thing at all, by the way. By no manner of means: "Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Like the famous 'aesthetic number' 1.618 [the Golden Ratio, ed.], trochaic tetrameter catalectic has an ineffable attraction."
I couldn't've said it better myself.
Well... Example:
Web-server in 100% asm.
Mail-server in 100% asm.
Database-engine in 100% ams.
Even though it's intel only it makes sense.
If I buy a cheap intel machine to run my mail-server, I'd like it to run as fast as possible.
Today the fastest alternetive is a smalltrimmed linux.
An asm only OS and Mailserver would, if optimised, probably be considerably faster.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Great. The server being slashdotted, I had no access to the FAQ, just the bootdisk from a mirror.
Whatever happened to forgoing the usefulness and maintainability of something and saying, god forbid: Nice Hack. I bet the people who got this puppy running are damn proud of themselves, and they should be. Great, youre not Linus Torvalds. But for all the negative comments, think about the personal accomplishment for the authors. I sure as hell couldnt do it.
By your logic, the original doom supported 3d cards because gldoom currently exists.
Ahh yes. My first assembly language programming was on the TMS9900 processor, and second on the 65C02. Being register deprived isn't great speed-wise but it's not so big a deal otherwise. The 6502 series processors had an impressive array of addressing modes to compensate for the lack of registers. The "zero page" addressing modes in particular were basically designed to allow you to pretend to have 128 16-bit registers using the first 256 bytes of memory. But still, the real thing is better. I thought I was in heaven when I learned 68030 assembly (my third assembly language). I thought I was in hell when I learned my fourth (you guessed it: x86).
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
So who wants to write a Voodoo 3500 driver for it?
;-)
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
mmmmmmm...grits.
-Andy Martin
-Andy Martin
If y'all don't like me, blow me.
This has been an incorrect statement ever since Fortran G or H, which is to say, probably for your entire life.
Those Fortran compilers from the 70s were well known for producing smaller and faster code than anything comparable generated by people who had been hand crafting assembler for years. The current crop of C compilers aren't as good as those old Fortran compilers, but they are still a far cry above what 99.9% of the current crop of coders can accomplish.
Nope, V2 never had that type of "time to market" problems.
I realize it's rarely practical for anything
It's great for simple microcontroller-based devices.
Actually, you'd be surprised how easy Microchip PIC assembly is. It's alot of fun, too.
The things some people have done with them are amazing. I even saw an easy-to-build Pong project.
Lots of people are using PC hardware for real-time embedded systems. I've seen many migrations from VME 680X0 systems to rack-mount x86 PCs. The VME hardware is nice but it is horribly expensive and the compilers and OSs aren't cheap.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
moderate this up
Indeed. Asm owns.
...to do a JDK port to this fine upcoming OS!
I understand that you are opensource natalie portman and open source drew barrymore, while grits boy is the boy with the grits, which is a different thing entirely. I respect your oeuvre as well as his. If the word "oeuvre" annoys or sickens you, I'll just have to keep saying it until you become acclimated. That's the only way to deal with these things: Face your fears.
Nevertheless, I seem to recall that you (though it may have been a clever impostor) have indeed mentioned grits in your work. If this is not so, I do not care, because I see grits boy and the open source natalie yadda yadda project as two sides of the same coin of consciousness. Two leaves on the same paradigm. You both express the same inchoate yearnings of the oversoul, though you may express them in slightly different terms. Therefore, it is a small matter to me whether you are two different "people" or not. There is only one Person, we're all just an infinite number of different ends of the same worm, peeking out of different holes.
eheheh np
Please stop treating Slashdot like your lab. This is not an experiment to see what does and does not get points. You have some morals. We know that. You're probably a nice guy even. Hopefully. I bet you're even on Malda's good side. So please stop and think about how your experiments affect Slashdot and the users.
Your post was funny as hell (licking their asses?), but what do you have against Tom C?
Without his work, I'd probably know a lot less Perl than I do now.
Please explain.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
This is offtopic, but this article inspired it...
I was thinking... compilers do so much work to unroll+optimize loops. It would be simple to just tag each spot in the instruction queue w/ a counter. Then, implement 2 instructions: 1 says "add n to the counters on the last m instructions" and the other says "don't take the next n instructions out of the queue-a loop instruction is coming up". Simply executing the held instructions is easy-all the processor's mechanisms are already dedicated to making that work. Instructions that don't use the registers in the loop keep on executing in the free part of the queue.
For flexibility, say both instructions act as nops if n > the size of the queue. Exceptions are generated if you attempt to call a function within the block.
It only works on small+simple loops, but that's just right for doing a bunch of load or store operations to init an array from a bunch of objects, or vice versa.
Whadda y'all think?
And it appeared here first, so it can't be copyrighted by someone else, right?
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
convincing defense of useless time-wasting projects like the Perl/GNU utils thing
It's pretty ironic that you say that, considering how this whole thread got started! I guess the difference is that the the guys writing V2 are doing it for fun.
Where's the irony? I mentioned that it was that statement of his which brought him to mind in connection with the post that started this thread. I said that his defense was "logically sound and convincing". I took issue with his manner, certainly, but I made it as clear as I could that I agree with the substance of what he said. IIRC, part of his defense was that he was doing the Perl/GNU thing for fun. Which according to me in my post, is necessary and sufficient.
If I was insufficiently clear, I apologize, but I don't think I was. IMHO the real hole in my argument is the fact that I did take him to task for flaming, but I did so in a discussion resulting from a very similar flame of my own. Or is that what you mean? If so, well, you've got a point.
!OR! How about all these l33t open source coders give up on linux and put some effort into building a truly innovative operating system instead of a 1970s technology clone. And unless it was 68k or something, I dont think I would develop it in asm either. ;)
Python has it's loops defined by indentation. If you loose the indentation for any reason, then the program is destroyed.
This is incorrect. I remember getting really EXCITED about the release of KA9Q user-mode networking for early Linux. Kernel-mode networking took a bit longer to arrive, but Linux 0.12 was very useful even without it.
Dude! Who are you to say what someone should or should not put their time into??? If he wants to hack away at the 37KB OS that seems like a perfectly reasonable endeavor to me. Hell, I've often thought it would be cool to design a simple microprocessor and implement it with like standard 74HC combinational logic and a whole bunch of wire wrap or something just for the sake of doing it. Got a problem with that too? Duh.
Well, they can have a lot of fun porting that to other architectures. x86 is horrible in comparison with the register rich alphas. Aside from that, benefits from ASM are only reaped by using it to optimize those portions of code that the executable spens 90% of its time in. It really sounds like these guys wrote themselves a rather large and difficult to maintain and debug OS.
You're right, of course; however 60 years is way out. Think about it, smart compilers can already write better assembler than humans. We already have hardware with fault detection and automatic rerouting (old hat technology.) And it would be relatively simple to write something that "evolved" its code to gain performance over time (infinite monkeys style). The AI to do this is already here, it just has no real purpose as yet (as far as I know.) I bet some dusty research lab is already doing this kind of stuff.
My own $0.02 - you might look into some microcontroller projects - maybe based around a PIC or HC05/HC11 or something. That way you could learn a little bit about electronics as well. Kinda fun stuff.
. . . that a grad student at MIT made, just for the sheer hell of it. I don't have a link, this was somebody a relative knew when he was there maybe eight or ten years ago.
Then it's essentially a bundle of device drivers with a boot loader thrown in. I hope they did it for hack value, because it's hard for me to believe they wouldn't otherwise have been better off using DOS4GW.
anyone know of a mirror>?
I personally use Linux, just because it suits my needs... sometimes... When it comes to games, then the choice is imposed by Winshit... Anyway, a xxkB OS is nice, just for the pleasure of coding it, or using it. You want a lightweight OS, to run on your diskless pentium? Then it's nice to have such a lightweight thing! To be sincere, I dream of a nice VR OS, like the one shown in Johnny Mnemonic (can't remember the exact syntax... :b)... But I'm afraid it won't show until some years, and in the meanwhile, I please myself playing with such neaty OS like V2..!
eh? was that their motivation? i didn't see anything like that on their site.
--ac
If the page said it was, my apologies. It seems to have been Effect-ed.
WHy not just put the effort into developing Linux killer apps, or help current Linux projects? Seems like a waste of time/resources to me.
Perl is a fucking piece of shit, dude. Tom Christiansen has fooled your dumb ass into believeing that you actually need to know Perl. That is a fucking joke. Perl is the most overblown, oversold language in the fucking world.
Tom Christiansen is an annoying prick who thinks he's some fucking genius. In fact, standing next to Larry Wall, Tom looks like Lou Costello. Someone needs to shut that guy up.
Um, yes.
The problem is, so many of us have never seen a good compiler. GCC is certainly not an example of a good compiler, but it still beats half of us.
The computers wouldn't need Assembler either, they'd generate the machine code directly. At least that's how I understand this utopia.
It's interesting to watch a server in the process of overloading.
Ping time from me: 900 ms.
Time page takes to load: three minutes and counting...
I admire your integrity.
Personally, I can't understand why this project exists. Speed? Hardware is fast, it's always getting faster, and existing operating systems are as fast as you make them. Being the speed king matters for all of 7 months, when Intel releases a new revision of their processor that negates all your hard hacking. Well, if they're having fun writing it, I guess it has a place.
The primary intended purpose for the OS was to act as a framework for realtime computer-controlled video playback in a "black box" fashion. The lack of a lot of accepted OS features like memory protection is part of its featurelist. For an embedded realtime system with only one real purpose, a framework like this can make a lot of sense.
You also have to bow for the job Joost has done in relatively little time with a notable lack of available hardware documentation. The hack value of it all is, IMHO, pretty high.
Pi
Madscience Labs - Rotterdam
Get PostOffice
It appears you didn't read the article (or the FAQ it linked to), or even the complete (but incorrect) summary. V2 is not "free". You can download some source code (its license was not covered in the FAQ or from the main page; it's probably accessable), but the essential parts of the operating system are closed. It's definitely not "Open Source".
Personally, I can't understand why this project exists. Speed? Hardware is fast, it's always getting faster, and existing operating systems are as fast as you make them. Being the speed king matters for all of 7 months, when Intel releases a new revision of their processor that negates all your hard hacking. Well, if they're having fun writing it, I guess it has a place.
And why limit their users to a legacy 32-bit architecture, and make themselves completely non-portable at the same time? This is DOS for 1992, instead of DOS for 1980. I have a perfectly good 64-bit Alpha by my desk at work, and I intend to buy more of them in the future. Apparently these guys intent on using their Pentium II's in 2005.
--
This might make a good minimal OS for a car MP3 player, all it needs now is Linux's networking so we can port samba and Apache accross.... Hmmm maybee I'll stick with Linux.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
don't gameboys run on some sort of motorola chip?
OFTC: By the community, for the community
i want to open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore without your permission, if it is ok with you that i do this.
i want to look cool as i walk down the street with my open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore in my laptop.
natalie portman and drew barrymore "grab" me and i want to open source them.
i want to scratch the itch they produce in me.
i want to "get it."
thank you in advance.
V2 OS is smaller and is way more stable, and way faster. At least I don't get those kernel panic screens of death, and who needs all those man pages and useless utilities. It's all bloat. V2 OS is coming and all other OS's are for clueless people. People with real clue don't use Emacs or VI. They write their own text editor in assembler.
Why not? There's about 3.2 kerzillion computers out there with compatible procesors.
isn't that the point of good COMPILERS these days?
Nope. The point of good compilers is world domination. The point of not-so-good compilers is to serve quality coffee at an affordable price. Any questions?
Portability isn't everything. Some people (me) program asm for any and every chip anyways so what's the big deal? all "assembly languages" are relatively the same anyways. Once you learn assembly for one chip learning it for another is like learning PASCAL after learning C and BASIC.
I like the idea but do we really need another closed source operating system. I like the fact they wrote it in assembly now if they would just GPL the source code so someone else can re-write it to work on a Motorala based computer. I know Assembly doesn't work the same a C for portablity but rewriting a 37K operating system to work on different platforms would give programmers alot more reason to write applications. I have not seen any 386 processor for sale new but motorala still makes its 68000 in various forms. This would make the OS a more likely canidate to be used. Then write Applications using slower but more portable C code that would work on both platforms. But maybe that the whole reason the authors didn't GPL it. I would also like to know if their is a mirror because I can't seem to get their entire site. I did read their faq The OS is Free but not GPLed.
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
Well if anyones interested on OS design and Assembly hacking. I've started a L4 Micro-Kernel implimentation for the ARM, specifically the StrongARM SA-1100. While we plan on doing the rest of the OS in C. There is a chance for some hacking of assembly code and making use of the interesting
make up of the SA-1100. The code is GPL'd. Only rather rudimentory snap-shots are avaliable. But the start of it is running on PLEB hardware (public domain hardware I designed) and the SA-1100 evaluation board (Brutus) it should be easily portable to any ARM machine though. I have a Psion 5 I'm working on getting it running on too. However if ASM's not you thing the rest of the OS on-top of the micro kernel is still some area of OS development fun in C for those interesed.
Its still a start-up so only for those interested in getting their hands dirty in embedded OS development for the ARM.
Some out-of-date info is avaliable at:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb
While kernel snapshots and my thesis on the kernel are avaliable via anonymous ftp from:
ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/awiggins
Just mail me if your interested in any of it.
Enjoy, WeirdArms (awiggins@cse.unsw.edu.au)
Q: The OS boots perfectly to the prompt, but it doesn't respond to the keyboard.
A: We've had a few people mailing us with this question (Mostly Laptop users, VMWare has this problem aswell). It has to do with a BIOS that does not reset the keyboard controller at bootup. V2_OS should do this manualy, but since we have never encountered this problem, it's not included yet. We'll try to fix it in the next release. If anyone knows how to reset this keyboard btw, info is welcome :)
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
and in a dusty rack shelf behind the bike shed still lives the 80286 AT box & keyboard with real springs & the Apple][ case with the hand mounted ARM board & the 4xtransputer plugin card. and i still have the MINUX ( yes, boys and girls, pre-LINUX ) source that we hacked onto three platforms via hand built assemblers/KR2 C compilers ... & why ... because it is fun.
Very Eloquently Put. Now why don't you stop foaming at the mouth, take a deep breath, and tell us WHY you don't like Perl, instead of just shooting your fucking foul mouth off. 25 out of 10 for feeling, -5 out of 10 for rational debate. (You could learn a LOT from the style of the other AC.)
Is it an obscure errno, or a facist salute, you decide.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
There are many well known Open Source OSes that are suitable for embedded systems.
;). This is aimed at smaller systems than RTEMS and is highly configurable. It is supported on fewer processors than RTEMS but this is mainly due to it's youth. The licence is similar to the RTEMS one but is not based on the GPL. For more info see http://sourceware.cygnus.com . Again, full blown commercial support is available.
The oldest is RTEMS. It orginally started life as a US Army project which was then made available as Open Source. It runs on most 32bit and some 16 and 64bit embedded processors including the m68k, ColdFire, x86, PowerPC, MIPS, Hitachi SH, Sparc, etc. It has a flexible API, supports POSIX apps, has a TCP/IP stack and all of the usual features. The next release (due soon) will bring the joys of filesystems, embedded web servers, ITRON API support and other useful features. The licence is GPL + a simple exception (like libio or libstdc++ in gcc). More info can be had at http://www.rtems.com/ . Full blown commercial support is available from the main developers if required.
The new kid on the block is eCos from Cygnus/Red Hat (or should that be Cyghat
Another newcomer is uC/Linux. This is a version of Linux suitable for use on MMUless processors like the m68k/ColdFire series and the i960. Has most of the features that we know and love(?) from it's larger cousin. Great for information appliance like devices, less so for truely embedded or real time applications.
Of course there are other choices if you have more powerful hardware... I think that both xBSD and Linux have realtime extensions and they can both run on a wide variety of processors.
i love slashdot. But everyime it comes to Germany they compare the Nazis with Microsoft. Check out germany today, folks. Its nice, really. MS isnt so whats your point?
That's the weirdest computer programming article I've read in a long time!!! http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/ratc/ratc.html.
I truly wish there was a way of preventing idiots like these from posting constantly on every discussion going on. What's the thrill in it?
I thought two of the important mental capabilities were the abilities to abstract and draw generalizations. Are you seriously implying that so future AI won't have these methods available to it? Why work with atoms when working with molecules will get your job done easier?
I do agree that at some point, an AI would need to generate machine code for whatever it's running on. But, how it arrives at what machine code to generate will most likely be at a higher level. It won't "think" in machine code, it will have some means of abstractly represnting and manipulating knowledge.
Of course, an evolved solution could produce the equivalent of ten zillion lines of spaghetti coded machine code. But that doesn't sound very fault tolerant to me.
You think anyone can spare that sort of SIZE?! It's 37 freaking KILOBYTES!! Thats nearly 6% of my allotted 640k (or am I messing up kilobits with kilobytes?)!!
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
You know... ha ha. Laugh.
Uh, hate to break this to you, but the x86 is one of the most commonly used embedded platforms. Go get a few embedded magazines (you know what I mean) and check out the ads: there are more ads for x86 SBCs than all the others combined. Maybe not in your set-top box, but just about anywhere else: traffic lights, all kinds of industrial machinery and robots, etc.
Some have brought up the fact that V2 doesn't seem well suited for general use, as there's no memory protection. On the other hand, it's writting in x86 ASM, which makes it not that well suited to special use devices. The question is then, what do the designers and writers have in mind?
I took a look at the "native" filesystem of V2, v2_fs, which seems to be have a strangely specific purpose for a default OS filesystem. From their site:
"It is designed and optimized especially for fast hard diskaccess, which is very usefull for, for example, a digital audio/videoplayer/mixer."
"-Videoframes are stored sector-aligned, for faster loading to disk/decompression-buffers
-All data is stored sequentially, this eliminates the need for the physical disk-heads to jump and search around."
They also have some precise technical information on the filesystem layout.
Their claims of no need of defragmentation seem really strange in light of the requirement that files are entirely sequential on disk; sure, you might have less internal fragmentation because you can use a small block size, but... no external fragmentation? I'd like to see how they accomplish that.
The strange marketing style descriptions they have aside, I think the filesystem suggests what the kernel writers had in mind, which is an OS well suited to deadline-oriented tasks like video, without bringing out the spectre of real-time.
If they're so fast, why are they already slashdotted?
umm, when can i get it for windows cuz win is l33t and it w00d be lam0r to put it on the linux, cuz the linux doesnt have cool stuff like !WinAMP! and this is supposed to be a fast thing, this V2, so it of course doesn't werk on the slow-@$$ linux. i want it on my mac t00!
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Damn fucking right.
Spot on.
I think your views reflect the views of quite few other people out there.
That is all.
About six months ago I downloaded a trial version of the New Deal OS and tools. They had a functional web browser, Dial-up networking, text editor, spreadsheet, window manager, games, and other apps. All this in ASM and as a 30 day demo. It only cost about 25-50 bucks and was intended to bring life back to 286s and 386s. Something like a couple of megs with all the software, maybe smaller. It had a Windows look to it but worked great. The really neat thing was the developer community at the site. Lots of gratis software, like some apps for the Palm. e.g."Check out this neat app I coded and tell me what you think, and you can keep it free." Check it out at New Deal Inc.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
That's why!
Does anyone else feel that a fresh start can only be good?
hello people. I've just poured hot grits down my pants after listening to this guy criticize me !!!
Assembler is a language that is one step removed from machine code, which as well all know is the only langauge the computer actually understands. In order to get the computer to do certain things, we need to provide instructions. Assembler provides a mapping of machine level instructions (binary code) to hexadecimal short hand, thereby making it easier to categorize and memorize the instructions. Assembler, being a language, supports vendor specific enhancements beyond hexadecimal short hand to make coding programs even easier. These enhancements include mnemonics for the hexadecimal instructions, further increasing the ability to categorize and memorize instructions. Being that these are enhancements, assembler programs can be coded completely in hexadecimal. If one were to do this, the program would be exactly 1/4 the size of the equivalent machine code version.
-- Linux and grits down my pants. Does it get any better?
And you can walk into any screwdriver shop and buy one on a bare board (or not), and get an operating system at any computer store. When I get my first PPC, in case it seems to be DOA I expect to be able to drag it back and have someone with a clue take a look immediately- I'm certainly not going to mail order anything I haven't already worked with.
Where can I get started with some basic ASM coding? I realize it's rarely practical for anything, but I'm just interested in trying it.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
That meaning has already been there.
No, not a palm pilot with phone abilities, a phone. I want Linux on my Nokia, goddam it!
moderators, please recognize this troll and moderate him up. he obviously does not belong here in the negative numbers.
damn, this guy is my hero. He actually considers dwelling in the negative zone a badge of honor and fiercely protects his fiefdom from "infidels" !!! Can I be your VP?
Probably C would be a better idea than ASM, but WTH, maybe they can come up with something worthwhile. Show off with benchmarks.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the story. But, it is Signal 11 after all, so I'm sure it will be up to (Score:5, Interesting) within an hour....
Wow, I can't even believe this post, and most of the other posts like this.
One of the traits I've always associated with "nerds" and "geeks" is the love of something cool simply because it's cool, not because it's somethig that is immediately useful in life. Judging something by simple utility is a trait I commonly associate with management students, simply because that's how the majority of them seem to think. (of course you're thinking, wow, what a stereo-type, but I think going on trips with 30 or so management students moves me past the glib stereotyping stage to at least semi-glib, or quasi-glib).
Anyways, point is, this is *cool*, even if it's not useful. If you can't use it, boo hoo, there's tons of stuff in the world I can't use, you don't see me bitching about it on Slashdot.
Perhaps this is a FAQ or something... Dunno, their site is slashdotted. :)
I've done my share of ASM disassembles, thank you. It's not as easy as all that. I mean, the instructions are there in front of you, and if it's on OS you can be fairly sure they aren't going to try to obfuscate, like a company writing copy protection might.
But, for something as powerful as an OS, and with as much potential to screw things up if it's not used right, it's not enough to trace through and NOP out a few instructions, you have to understand everything, including figuring out what all the variables are and naming them.
An assembler takes ASM instructions and lets you use labels, if you disassemble an exe (that has been stripped), those labels are gone.
For some reason I cannot reach the server. Sure ZDNET etc can handle the load but a TON of other servers, running Linux or Windoze do not have the capacity to deal with 50K+ additional users. I think /. should develop some scripting mechanism which sends an e-mail out to the admins of systems which are not well known to be high capacity. The admin then has the priviledge to deny that listing if it is going to bring the server down. Many servers run on virtual hosts and getting /.ed does a lot of harm to folks who also happen to be sharing the servers.
anyone know of a mirror?
;)
They're on a 128Kb leased line. Welcome to the wonderful world of former monopoly driven telco bastards (they're paying for the connectivity through their noses). I'll offer them a mirror if they want me to. Up till now it hasn't been necessary
Pi
It should be moderated up for being so funny. ;)
If you don't get it, try to remember your not-so current events. Or just get an encyclopedia.
Not necessarily. If a simple compiler is written in machine code (like the assember would have to be), it could be used to compile a C program used to compile a more complicated compiler. And that compiler used to compile an even more complicated compiler. And so on. No assembly required.
Delphi was written in Delphi.
Ozwald
Very cool idea. We have spent a lot of time working on cool OSs, but for the most part, we run them on what should be called pathetic hardware designs.
Face it, the PC design is a very bad joke. It started out as bad in 1981 (YES, it was a bad design in 1981, and I said so then. 16 bit processor, 8 bit bus. Shortage of on-board resources. Shortage of interrupts and slots on DAY ONE. Bizzare memory layout. BIOS in ROM. BASIC in ROM), and the attempts to "improve" and "update" it to a 16 bit then a 32 bit bus have been hampered by the desire to maintain compatability with the original bad design.
Most other platforms with history (Macintosh, for example) have similar problems with historical mistakes which won't quite die.
Back in my youth, I used and loved a Heathkit H-100 computer (kit form of the Zenith Z-100), a system that showed what could be done with a properly designed 8088 design. The only significant design limitation was the 8088 processor (instead of the available 8086), but that was done to support its other processor, an 8085 (there to run older CP/M-80 applications). The machine had an IEEE-696 S-100 bus, which was a 16 bit bus, with 24 bit addressing, so they were thinking AHEAD, not backwards when they designed it. The Z-100 was designed as a transition between the 8 bit world and the 16 bit world, to exploit the new without being cripped by the old. I have talked to people who worked for Zenith, and had seen the machine which was planned to replace the Z-100, completing the transition to the 16 bit world. Wow. I can't tell you how dissapointed we should *all* be that the IBM design is what we all work around now.
I'll take minor exception to your use of the phrase "Wintel architecture". YES, Intel now has a lot to do with the PC design (being a major manufacturer of "glue" chips and (co?)designer of the PCI bus and other current "features"), but the primary problems we have with the PC design are the the fault of IBM's PC design and the industry and market for having embraced that design and not letting go.
It really would be cool to see a machine with modern technology using familiar sounding parts without the limitations of the IBM design... Yeah, there were other machines which avoided the PC design completely (I've got a few Altos machines in the basement, and the Sun 386i you mentioned), but they are too few and too far in between.
Gotta get my own soldering iron and wrap tool out one of these days and start doing some hardware hacking myself...
On the other hand, it is very difficult to really roll-your-own hardware anymore. When dealing with proceesors with bus speeds of 286s and beyond, you aren't really dealing with digital signals anymore, but radio, where every wire is an inductor and a capacitor... Ah, for the days of 1MHz processors 8)
Dream on. This boring post probably helped you get to dreaming. Wake up!
Nick.
Actually, V2_OS is the work of a single person, Joost Faassen, a 21-year-old Dutchman, who is both good at assembly and OS programming, and a modest, nice person. Granted the OS is not revolutionary, but it's a Nice Hack(tm). I can say that, because we hired that person at my company (before he released V2_OS to the public, that is, that's not related :), he'll help work on the 'revolutionary' part here on another project.. You'll see and hear more of it real soon.
of linux then? we already have a bunch of open source unixes and tons of commercial ones.
www.opencores.org go there and help these guys :) well in my opinion it would be enough if someone could get me a .18 micron 80386 cpu and all the necessary hardware of that era built with today technology. imagine simple notebooks running for days on a single battery pack :)
Really.This looks like an exercise in OS design and x86 assembler coding. I hope these guys had a lot of fun writing it, because that's all the utility that's going to come out of it. Do we need a mini-OS for desktop machines? Nope. Do we need one for palmtops? Yes, but palmtops don't run x86 processors, oops. Do we need one for embedded processors? Also yes, but x86 processors are quite rare there, plus there are already a couple of OSes around and even at least one (AFAIK) open-sourced.
So I'm standing here, wondering: what's the point?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Threaded Forth or Java bytecode do even better, plus there's always compression. A megabyte of disk space costs about $0.01, our overall supply of caffeine and enthusiasm is bounded, and the world would have been better off had this effort been put into something more reusable.
Well, minus the v, this is an anagram for the dreaded OS2... which probably have done well if it wasn't for the fact that it was up against microsoft, and it wasn't publized enough. Ok, i'm already a little sidetracked.
Anyway, onto my point, or the lack thereof. Is it just me or does anyone else think this isn't going to really go anywhere.... oh well, that being said, knowing my ability to fortell the future, it'll probably revolutionize
the computer industry...
thanks for the link by the way... funny.
Hmmmm... I guess you'll have to write a compiler then. And how do you do that? Use assembly language
Let me guess, you don't write compilers for a living....
At the risk of making an overly general statement, NOBODY does what you describe anymore. A compiler is one of the more perfect examples of something that shouldn't be written in assembly language. It embodies some fairly complex algorithms but is itself not very speed critical. Most people don't care about how fast their compiler outputs code, merely how fast the resulting code is when run.
The two most available open source C compilers (gcc and lcc) take a similar approach by defining new machines via a rather compact machine description file. This allows the compiler to properly abstract the portions of the compiler which aren't machine dependant (the input parser, symbol table construction, parse tree assembly and the like) from the parts that are (code generation). The result is a compiler which is easier to port to new architectures, and has less errors.
Most of these compilers similarly use assemblers written in C. Initially these are cross-assemblers, but once the assembler is compiled by your new compiler, you can run the assembler in native mode. *voila*
To write machine descriptions for these compilers, you of course _do_ need to know something about the assembly language of the target machine, but this is vastly easier than writing the entire compiler in assembly.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Well, how are you going to compile a C program on a new chip if there are no C compilers written for it?
Probably the same way you'd write an assembler for it, in C/C++/Java/whatever on another computer...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Like the title says... embedded systems.
Devices such as routers, firewalls, and other network appliances (not to mention things like assembly-line robots and traffic signals) all come under the category of embedded systems. They are typically single-task devices that run without direct human intervention.
These devices share a few common characteristics:
- They have cheap CPU's (typically at least two generations old... hey, there are still Z80's being made!)
- They have small amounts of RAM (a few K to a few megs)
- They have a very limited space for the operating system itself (typically a few K of non-volatile RAM up to a few megs of flash disk)
There is quite a market for such mini operating systems. Many such devices use Intel architecture hardware, and of these, most are sufficiently PC-compatible that you can actually boot them under DOS (assuming you can get DOS onto the nonvolatile storage).A few examples: pSOS, VxWorks, IOS (okay, well, IOS isn't "mini" :)
The point is, these systems all need an operating system that is small-footprint, CPU-cycle-efficient, doesn't need much of a user-interface (just enough for editing config files and such), and extensible. x86 compatibility is a big, big plus, as it makes the physical design MUCH easier and cheaper.
Sounds like a useful thing to me!
Also what is the point of a faster assembler based OS if it is difficult to program for, and has barely nothing running on it?
I have five words for you "Go back to the 20's"
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS/M/Sd?s-:a---->?c++UL+++P++++L++++ E+++W+++N+K-w---M-PSY+t+5?XtvbDI++
I've mirrored the whole downloads page here.
I can only hope it stays up for more than a few minutes... I've never gotten to load-test whatever server this is I'm using in Win95. ;-)
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
the desktop & servers.
The embedded market is the fastest portion
of the computer industry. When you have 512K
of flash to store all your applications, and
MAYBE another 256K of RAM, you have to squeeze
everything that you can bare out of your software.
I couldn't get to the website,
I suppose, so excuse the next few comments if
this isn't a RTOS...
As for speed, alot of these systems will be
running something like DSP-type filters with
massive data processing rates. When you have
massive MBs of data to process per second, a
faster OS helps alot. I know of a GPS receiver
for which they doubled the location output
rate because their embedded CPU's compiler
added one new optimization!
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
One thing to bear in mind is that old slower processors can actually cost more than the new faster ones under certain conditions. I learned this when Powermacs were starting to take over and I thought a ultra-cheap onepiece Mac would be neat. Turned out 68040s actually cost more at the time than PPC chips, because the latter was where the volume was. Maybe you might think about embedded PPC or MIPS or something? Is there genuinely a market for, and producers of, 386 chips now?
Yup, that's right..
it depends on how "into" writing the post i am and how quickly a connection with whatever story comes to me.
i hear you. i write insane-right-winger trolls, and i have the same problem sometimes. it just doesn't come, you know? so i end up repeating old themes, and then people get in my face about it. sure, it's flattering that they feel they have a right to expect a certain level of quality from me, but if they think it's so damn easy creating on demand, they should try it themselves. of course i appreciate the support i get, and that's what makes it all worthwhile, blah blah blah. (that and the way the guy in the next cube at work always asks what i'm laughing so insanely about. oh, yeah, and the responses from reasonable people who think i'm serious -- and best of all the morons who think i'm serious but who agree with me.)
i just created a hidden thread intended for discussion of troll issues:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=tro lltalk
Okay, show of hands, who has heard of a 'pointer to a pointer' and why you might want to have one? Concept could be used in roll-your-own memory management like you have to do in C and C++ :)
Those of you believe in ASM programming is faster apparently have never done any code optimization job before and never coded ASM of a BIG program. Of course, because nobody with the right mind will do that. Sure if you compare "Hello World" in C and ASM you'd see a huge difference, but how many ASM programmers can write something as big as a GUI wordprocessor? No way.
The only use of ASM, admittedly, is more than just reverse engineering. Some little bits and pieces of procs may be re-written in ASM to increase performance. Some device drivers may be written in ASM. I love ASM but I ain't crazy.
I have coded both MIPS and x386 and just THINKING about the thousands of block graphs for optimization is a horrible thought.
In this particular case of OS, i think it's a terrible idea because that makes it so damn hard to be portable, pretty much impossible. And even harder to read the source code, if not impossible. Granted that GCC ain't perfect, writing a compiler is hard as hell, MUCH HARDER THAN WRITING AN OS. what do you expect for free?
Although oddly enough, it doesn't seem to be around anymore ... -spc (Why do I even remember this stuff?)
It would be nice to see something come of this os venture.. Its probably a ways off.
but wait.. how long until they port lynx to v2? oops.. forgot.. no tcpip or networking. DOH!
Ok im done; stick a soup ladel in me.
LW
Ok so I goofed :) :)
It's still a neat toy
I don't actually exist.
> Come on, this is opinion, not fact.
Not at all.
I assume you'll agree that the OS is the base for the whole system. If the OS is crap, the systems is crap. If the OS is buggy, the system is buggy.
So, why don't you agree that if the OS is closed source, and unauditable, that the whole system gains those worst traits?
Using closed source security systems, with black-box encryption is a bad idea. You can't see the potential bugs, so you can't guard against them.
Why is an OS any less prone to this? In fact, using a security system (PGP, etc) on a closed source OS is insecure. You don't know if there's a way for processes to read the memory of other processes, or if buffer overruns or other easily audited bugs exist which could crash the system under heavy load.
This isn't an issue which is based on opinion. The more open the source, the more people who can find bugs.
Open source doesn't always mean GPL. And even in a GPLed project, the dev team doesn't always solicit code. About all we can agree upon is that open source is source that is readable by everyone.
An OS isn't the place for strange proprietary code, an OS is the place for well tested, frequently audited, stable, open, and trusted code.
And, why do we need another OS? Do I believe we've got the best we'll ever get?
No.
But, I don't believe some hand-coded closed source, non-protected memory OS is *ever* going to rival what we have. If this was a real protected mode OS, with a decent design spec addressing current concerns, and those of the future, I might give it a little credit.
But, V2 lacks so many features of what we'd consider a real OS that it doesn't even belong in the same ballpark as MS-DOS, let alone Linux, BSD, and even NT.
I don't know why you ". . .can't understand why this project exists. . .", I mean we're just a bunch of humans bossing around a bunch of machines. Why _not_ teach them a new language? Plus it's fun, and you never know where it will go. As for abondoning old machines just because the new shiny ones have arrived, what a waste. Not only can you do lots of things with the older machines and software, but, yet again, it's fun!
I have a perfectly good 486DX-100 by my desk at work, and I intend to find (for free) more of them in the future.
They can't kill ya cook ya and eat ya.
I don't get it either. When did the goal shift from hacking for fun to 'make linux own the world'? This is their toy ladies and gents. This is their particular strange twist of thought and slamming them for not writing 'killer linux apps' is ridiculous. Let the hackers hack. The rest of you, quit whining and LEARN to hack. --Ruhk (I can't find my friggin' password) PS: I make no claim to be a hacker. I can only wish.
Future algorithms will be coded directly in reconfigurable hardware.... (data flow architecture and so on - no hardwired commands!)
I love v2OS and I have only been using it for a day. I think it kicks ass how streamlined it is.
opensourceman, keep up the good work! Maybe sometime when i have more time on my hands i'll join your project and create an open-source Katie Holmes!
Oh baby...
nice touch ;)
btw, nice page you have
'BE the difference that makes a difference' - JEWEL
Why bother creating another free OS when we already have FreeDOS? FreeDOS is free, open source and has the huge advantage of able to use (most) DOS applications and development tools.
I have to agree with the poster before you. These guys arn't claimnig that they wrote an OS to try and take over the world, displace QNX, or crush microsoft. All they did was write a little OS. Obviously, if they cared about portablity, or whatever else, they wouldn't have done it.
. The readers of Slashdot expect more.
Exspect more from what? does every program ever writen have to comform to you exacting standards? If you don't want it, don't download it. No one is forcing you to.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I've been thinking about designing a reference implementation of an 80386 motherboard, one that actually does things right - hardware that puts the processor into 32-bit protected mode *right* *away*, minimalistic yet functional boot PROM similar to Sun bootproms on Sun3+, clean hardware design, multiple bus support - add to the list. What first got me thinking about this was Ingo Cyliax's CS335 workstation, a homebrew 68030 motherboard with an ISA bus and a Minix port. Essentially, a somewhat PC-compatible 68k machine. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time - an open motherboard design with schematics and all else freely available. Granted, it's limited and not particularly fast, but it still is worth looking at. There was a similar project that involved building an NS32535 machine, called the pc532. It's supported in NetBSD and (possibly) OpenBSD. I'm not naive enough to suggest that a home-grown motherboard design could ever be fabricated economically, but the fun part would be designing it and perhaps porting Unix to it while the machine is running on a circuit-level simulator. That's close enough to the real thing for me (I don't look forward to trying to debug problems on a five-layer PC board, do you? :-) Flame and moderate away, but at least give some thought as to what "open source hardware" could be. Wouldn't it be satisfying to have had in designing a well-engineered x86 workstation (Sun 386i comes to mind, amongst others), built from cheap parts but free of the insanity of Wintel architecture? Dreamer.. you're nothing but a dreamer.. :-)
This must be the first OS I downloaded within one second :-)
0.27 seconds to be precise....
Johan
A operating system named after an often errant WWII era Nazi rocket. I propose the next major OS be named Hindenberg.
I've tested it myself on such a computer. It's loaded off a floppy, residing in memory. It didn't do any harm to my machine, even though it has the possibility to do harm by formatting your hard drive partition into v2os format, but that's only if you tell it to.
Have you looked at his user page? It looks like somebody with moderation points has been derating his articles.
posts like like make me hard.
It may be RT, but for x86? Who wants to run an OS like that (granted, such OS's are important and necessary) on that kind of chip?
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
its not slashdotted here... but is kinda slow
Alright - I admit it - first command I typed in after help :)
Woo hoo!
About time.
When I'm moderator, I don't do any work! I just run my perl script that automatically seeks out his articles are marks them as overrated.
If an AC posted the above, it would've been marked as offtopic in seconds.
Someone needs to reprogram that bot so that it knows you don't use vi to write binary.
And the list goes on... but this should get the idea across. While this system may be free, what does it offer that the community needs?
Goddamit, why not just start calling this website LinuxDot -- I know I will from now on. I use Linux, love Linux, play with Linux for hours at a time, but why can't we just sit back and say: Hey that's a pretty cool hack. "I bet I wouldn't have the foggiest of premonitions on how to begin doing something that work/skill-intensive." But nooooo...the first little idea that pops in our minds is, "It's not Linux, it's not for the cause, I must criticize this", because we ALL know that using Linux is just about the same as BEING Linux Torvalds, so of course we can criticize anything that comes down the pike without the Happy Penguin Seal of Approval on it. Bah. LinuxDot from now on. Boo LinuxDot.
How hard would it be to write a million line C program in asm ?
Axiomatically, it's impossible. A million-line C program would have to be written in C, just as a million-line asm program would need to be written in asm.
... or did you mean write an asm program that is the functional equivalent of a million-line C program? *grin*
DNA just wants to be free...
.
Are you referring to the Synthesis operating system designed by Henry Masselin for a dual-processor 68xxx machine? I read his thesis as part of my graduates studies - VERY cool ideas - so many of them, in fact, I could hardly believe they all came out of the same person. I have a copy of his thesis somewhere on one of my bookshelves...
Last I heard, he was working in R&D somewhere & trading piggy-back rides w/his coworkers (no, I'm not kidding about the piggyback rides). I think there is a small group of researchers collaborating across the world trying to figure out all the ways they can use the ideas that he implemented.
can someone mirror that site possibly?
it is extremely slow!
i would but i don't have enough space...
Hmmmm... I guess you'll have to write a compiler then. And how do you do that? Use assembly language. Most compilers out there translate source code to assembly then use a native assembler.
So assembly isn't dead. It's just hidden.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I remember using Phil Karn's stuff under DOS, but how did userland networking work under Linux? Was there a character special file for the NIC you just had to read/write raw IEEE 802.x frames on?
Many compilers don't generate programs smaller than, say, 4-6k for FILETYPE LIMIT reasons. A stripped down image with just a ret instruction still needs room for header tables etc.
n y/home.html
For a really funky ELF asm experiment, read the following (believe me, it's worth it)..
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/ti
*borkborkbork*
I havn't checked to story yet (/.ed) but I wonder if the world needs another OS.
:o)
Currently we are strugling to get Linux taken seriously (people in the lame NT world think an app runnig on RedHat needs to be ported to Debian!) even though Linux appears to be out selling the Mac, quiet an achievement for something that can be had for free...
So, with Linux approaching real market share, do we want to fragment, not into distros, but free OS'es? I have seen requests to Open the Amiga OS...
In my view Linux need shelp to push on, we need at least 35% share, and no more unless we want to become the mainstream. I like being a well know underdog, thats why I can't programm on windows
Tokyo Joe
The OS isn't too exciting on its own. If they invented something new then I might be more excited or more willing to give them some more credit. Woop-dee-doo, they wrote a new version of DOS. Let me be the first to thank them for their work and congratulate them on this awesome accomplishment.
Seriously though, since the 1990's began the OS has moved from a blackbox produced in the white tours down to something your motivated hacker can reasonably get started in his spare time. There are a bunch of projects on the web, most aren't significant. Some might be. As a whole we no longer rely on IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to provide the OS as they see fit to provide it for us. This is good. The next step is to start innovating, creating, and advancing the science. There are enough projects out there that hopefully some of them will start to become technology test beds rather than knockoff projects and recreates. If we were to put Linux, BSD and eventually maybe Hurd on the top of the stack and call those our production kernels, then we can use V2, EROS, ReactOS, Fiasco, GNUMach, L4, and all the others as testbeds to create new ideas and try new things out. Then I could say, congratulations to these guys and mean it. Unless they have some other plans and this is just the 0.01 release, it looks to me like they are trying to get to where DOS was about 20 years ago and they are still a little bit short of that goal.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
Such a small OS is one step toward what I want: minimal yet functional OS, file system, TCP/IP stack, GUI, audio, and Java. Get all the fluff out of the way!
When form follows function, if form is beautiful then function is ideal.
No. Waste of time is a waste of time, regarless of Linux.
If you say that you never want to work on a closed source OS again, that's your business. If you say that you don't ever want to use a closed source OS again, ditto. But to say that it's entirely impractical to develop a closed-source OS is ludicrous.
Whatever your philosophical objections may be to closed source, if the system and interfaces are properly documented then there's very little (if any) potential gain from having access to the source. Or, to put it the other way round, giving access to the source doesn't excuse a lack of documentation as it requires that a programmer read through and comprehend the relvant source modules to code, rather than simply being able to look it up an a reference manual. With the many millions of lines of code a modern OS contains, that just isn't sensible.
You seriously believe that what we have now is as good as it can ever get?
If you want to improve the art of computing, you need to start somewhere. You could sit on your work until you've got something that can beat everything else and so will clearly win out, but that's not very sensible. A better idea is to release your developments periodically to help attract interest and developers. That way, you stand a far beter chance of ending up with something good down the line.
Whether anything will eventualy come of this is entirely open to debate. But I commend them for trying and the world would be a poorer place if no-one tried this sort of thing.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I can't check out their site yet, but having just completed a class which was dealing with pipeline optimizations, if they took those into account?
Having seen what modern processors do I would definatly not want to try to write a large assembler program let alone a whole OS.
Mark
And remember, Linus wrote Linux for fun also!
norp norp bzzt fzzzzt
Sometimes I just despair.
Look at all of you, pontificating, arms outstretched in righteous indignation because your views have been overlooked.
Well, I have a message for you: Shut it.
Firstly, the OS is Free. Free does not mean open.
Free means 'gratis' or 'given away at no cost to the customer' NOT 'modifiable', 'open source' or 'related to linux'.
Right, now we've got that one sorted..
This next vitriolic outburst goes out to all those debating the need / pointlessness of the entire project.
Don't bother.
It's neat. It's something to show your easily impressed friends. It may, even, have a future. Who knows, perhaps some great technological benefit may come of it. Who knows?
As it is, at the moment it's a great idea (if a little misguided) but wait to see what happens in the future before deciding that you know exactly what's going to happen.
Also, I'd like to remind you that the most pointless inventions often succeed - who remembers the Dyson Vaccuum Cleaners?
Completely bag-less, suck up far more dust than normal vaccuum cleaners, but half the dust it sucks up flies across the room when you try and empty the damn thing.
And, finally: A word from our sponsors:
Play quietly people. We don't want anyone escaping from the herd, do we now?
--Nick
Might be interesting if it came with a 1.2 compatible JVM. ....Andrzej
[...]
And many of them do. But if they choose not to, it's their time, not yours. Fuck off. Use Linux if you like, that's what it's there for, but don't start making any goddamn demands.
You probably did one of the best flame of the day on Slashdot. However you're not entirely right ; once V2 is advertised on Slashdot, it is quite right to criticize design choice flaws (namely: 100% assembly). It is also right, even if it is possibly counter-productive & cruel, to burst V2 authors claims such "V2_OS offers more speed, expandability, and hardware control fo adventurous projects and easy programming FOR FREE!", where they claim to do something "useful".
have a look at the links on this page :
http://hculinux.cjb.net
Plenty of asm stuff to get you started and a forum of linux asm people to ask questions.
*borkborkbork*
From http://www.vacets.org/diction/English/H_Engl.txt:
Halt and Catch Fire
(HCF) Any of several undocumented and
semi-mythical {machine instructions} with destructive
side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several
well-known architectures going as far back as the {IBM 360}.
The {Motorola} {6800} {microprocessor} was the first for which
an HCF {opcode} became widely known. This instruction caused
the processor to {toggle} a subset of the {bus} lines as
rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could
actually cause lines to burn up.
[Confirm?]
(14 Dec 1995)
Writing in assembly doesn't always give you the fastest code in town. If you do it in C and then compile it with 'pgcc -O6 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -ffast-math -funroll-loops ...' most times the optimization techniques of PGCC like inlining, loop unrolling, good register use, etc ... (see http://www.goof.com/pcg and http://gcc.gnu.org) , will beat asm hacks.
maybe I can take a look at this. ever since I learned x86 asm I've been wanting to do something with but have been too lazy now it looks like there's an operating system for me to fuck with. cool.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
OK. This is supposed to be news for nerds, yet, nearly every comment so far has been negative.
So what if it's 32bit, not Open Source and isn't 'Quake 3 ready'. Its small, fast and free.
How about checking it out, sending the guys an email, or, just for the hell of it, throw it on a floppy and try it in VMWare. Perhaps some of you 1337 c0d3rZ would enjoy writing some fast clean programs, instead of the library loving crap that is *nix software these days.
And, lest we forget, 30 year old legacy code is not exactly 'freshmeat'.
1. masm doesn't "dump out executables". It creates object files, just like any compiler, that still have to be linked into an executable.
.exe size:
.exe by default)
2. "safety hooks" doesn't make any sense if you're talking about a C compiler. C compilers create no runtime overhead whatsoever.
3. Executable size is not the compiler's fault. Some contributing factors to a large
- Debug symbols in your object files (This is a major factor)
- A huge initial stack segment
- Static libraries linked in
- Stub code linked in (DOS warning, Command-line parser, etc.)
- Unnecessary resources linked in (note that in VC, Version Info is put into your
- Nasty amounts of global arrays
- The PE format itself
Hands in my pocket
Once there was a college student in country in the very northern reaches of europe. his name escapes me. None the less, he was curious about the newly released 386 CPU, and decided to learn about it by writing assembly for it. God-knows-what mental issues this fellow had, but he decided to make his pet project the writing of an entire multitasking operating system.
Later i hear a bunch of C code was added to the 386 assembly code, but who cares. that was a project bound to fail from the start. I wonder what came of it.... wonder what happened to the guy too, what a complete loser he must be. Wonder if anybody even remembers his name anymore. assembly programming; ha what a joke! he must be sorry now.
How many of you just had to try out the "crash" command?
:)
Me, too.
Alright, but was it software-pipelined ?
- BIOS setup (including remote administration)
- networked system updates
- backup and restore software
- a clueful bootmanager
- tools for doing flash-updates on PCI-cards etc. (i.e. something like
/dev/bios) - desaster recovery tools as boot-sector restorage and debugfs
- networked access control
I wonder if this could give another boost to the OpenBIOS project, as their current code base hasn't gained critical mass yet to allow for efficient and distributed OpenSource development.There's already a fast, free, all-ASM operating system out there, just looking for project members!
It's got way more background, and has a much more proven design. Better app support too. It's already got EMACS!!!
It's called ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, and it'll run on your frindly Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10.
It became obsolete sometime in the early 1970s when K & R & T rewrote UNIX in C. For all its faults, honestly the new invention is much easier to maintain.
Link to Wired article on Henry Masselin: Qua
cpeterso
Actually, I question that chad is the lord of the intertent. And are you TMing "internet" or "self-appointed Unquestioned Lord of the internet"?
you will never see a vc5/vc6 app that is less than 4k, or that matter less than any number that is a multiple of 4k. How do you think the space filler virus works? windows apps are all aligned in the file as 4K chunks.
I will not argue about linux... it is indeed an awesome OS, and it's all I use at home. However, I'm having a hard time accepting the fact that people seem to be against the development of something new. Besides, I think the authors of V2 are doing it for FUN. How many people do you know that can say they wrote an OS in pure x86 asm? Probably not too many. I hardly think that the authors intend it to be used as a replacement to linux, but perhaps more as something for people to tinker with... "Check out what I did... poke at it if you want" My hat is off to people who do things to learn I certainly would have no idea where to begin....
Good compilers nowaday can beat human ASM programmers.
No.
I can see where it would be useful if all you want to do is squeeze every last drop of speed out of your system, convenience, portability, maintainability be damned...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
What's the difference between assembly and machine code? I recall that one of them is hex and one is binary, but pat that I'm as clueless and lame as the grits guy.
Does anyone know how V2 compares to ExoPC? It would seem to me that there's as much potential for speed gain in a good design as there is in language choice, and ExoPC is known for being very fast indeed. (As well as being 32-bit, Open Source and Quake 3-ready... :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, when a new chip is developed, the OS and compilers are developed for it in parallel, on a simulator running on an existing (fast) machine, and compiled using cross compilers.
AFAIK, Digital UNIX and the Digital compilers were running on Alphas when they got their first run silicon back from the fab, since they simulated Alphas on other machines to develop the software.
...because if you use a compiler, your program includes both your mistakes and the mistakes made by the person(s) who wrote the compiler, eh? Twice the mistakes.
Shouldn't we set up a contest for smallest OS footprint? Much like there seems to be a contest right now for smallest possible web server. The basic idea would be to create an OS that runs quickly on X86 with the smallest footprint. Now, what about requirements? How about: 1. Must be networkable (at least have TCP/IP drivers) 2. Must be bootable from a diskette. Anything else?
Some days Slashdot reminds me of a highway, where there is an endless series of rabbits lurking just off the shoulder, quivering and licking their asses to pass the time. They're eager, but they're not very bright and they're not very brave. Nevertheless, a time often comes when one of them gathers its courage, and with a joyously crazed look in its eyes, runs across the damn highway! Splat. Why? Don't ask me, I have a brain. I don't do these things. I don't claim to understand them. All I know is that there are all manner of marginally self-aware vertebrates running around loose on this tired old planet which, for reasons best known to themselves, will occasionally gather all their feeble energy and then release it all at once in a blaze of intense public idiocy. And an alarming number of these critters turn up on Slashdot.
Now, I hope you don't mind my asking, but what kind of a fucking MORON are you?
Why waste time on Linux when we've got [A-Za-z]+BSD?
Why waste time breathing when you could be ramming a goddamn stoat up your fat, stinking ass?
Why waste time posting mindless gibberish on Slashdot when you could be masturbating to a picture of Linus fucking Torvalds?
Nobody needs your goddamn permission to write code. Those of us who write code, do so because we like to. If a project "grabs" us, and if we have the time, we do it. Frequently we're "scratching an itch" as the man said, but as often as not, we're just playing. I don't recall ever having seen or heard an actual programmer (not even a drooling imbecile like Tom Christiansen) take the attitude you have. Why not? Because they "get it". Also because if they think more time should be spent working on "useful" projects, they're quite free to spend their own time on such things. And many of them do. But if they choose not to, it's their time, not yours. Fuck off. Use Linux if you like, that's what it's there for, but don't start making any goddamn demands.
Once humans are out of the programming business - lets say, 60 years, code building AIs will get right back to working close to the metal.
...not the game.
You do not grok assembly. I would post as an example the 10 line CRC16 routine I used to use for my YMODEM implementation, if I could find it...
because linux is THE operating system, investing time in anything else would be a waste.
Score: 2 (Interesting)???? WTF? how about -1 (Offtopic) The moderators are so high on crack, it hurts.
Speaking of small OSes, what do other people here thing of QNX (http://www.qnx.com)
However, dynamic translation of segments of code as it runs is certainly possible. FX!32 for NT/alpha does this with x86 binaries. I've been working on something to do this for linux (currently x86->alpha, but other sources and targets can be added)... As soon as I can get the code cleaned up I'll put it a public CVS server.
I was being completely sarcastic with my "yeah, I see what you mean post"
Looking back, that might not have been clear.
This OS seems like it was written purly as something fun for the authors to do. They pulled off an amazing thing, writing it all in ASM, and they wanted to share their accomplishment. 99% of the coments I read here are negative, why not praise them for what they managed to make in pure ASM.
Yes, is is kinda off topic. But this OS was never meant to be mainstreamed... it was a project. I thought nothing notable would be contributed to this thread, so I threw this comment in there to give bored late night /. readers something to muse over. Besides, I plug the Hacker Dictionary every chance I get - it's right next to HGTG on my bookshelf.
Sure other operating systems are portable.. But how many people don't have Alpha 5000 zillions and 5555 gig RAID hdd's and stuff. What about those people? An OS in assembly is faster, cooler, and a hell of alot smaller. "1m g0nn4 h4x0r j00 1n70 l1l' ph3153z" --llama
I love it... these guys write this incredibly tight code, and all you guys can do is slam it because it's not portable, because it's pointless, because it's not Linux. Yet you seem to like Star Wars crap made out of legos...
for learning to create kernels and learning how everything interacts. But I would much rather have energy spent on something like TUNES (www.tunes.org). There are plenty of traditional kernels out there (not to mention Linux, *BSD). RXDOS is completely asm also (not that it has the features of this kernel.. but still). Unix/DOS and mixture kernels are getting old.. why not do something completely new?
Gives new meaning to the words: "Boot from Floppy"
Gonna try this sucker out
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I don't see what's wrong with another OS. Isn't competition good? Oh yeah, I forget, only when it's linux.
Flamebait? No. Just responding to other posts, all in one convienient package.
Another tidbit, BeOS uses some ASM coding "when we need the speed." ASM is not unheard of in other os's.
have a good one
Dan
So, XMMS plugins work on Winamp now, and vice versa? No, didn't think so.
What Perl/GNU thing?
Irix and Solaris are not opensource, how are they suffering? Both are 64 bit unixs which preform and scale incredibly well.
win98 is kicking linux's ass right now in terms of games. you have quake3 and civ2. forget unreal tournament, after reading the general opinion here about having you download binaries I would have said "well fuck you then" and released only win32 binaries. Its like you would never have to download a required update anyhow.
cross platform compilation, if not exactly common place, can be done. I think doom or quake or both was/were developed on a NeXT, not too sure on that though.
http://www.onshare.com/filelist.jsp?dirid=19014&gu est=true If the web site is down I shared the bootdisk on OnShare.
It says it's written in 32 bit code, therefore your 286 won't run it.
screw you hll wussies, i'm addicted to asm and proud of it!
Another interesting project: SkyOS.
HA! That is one of the funniest postings yet. Very nice.
As a sidenote your points are very true indeed.
>No.
Well, good compilers can beat some human ASM programmers. Of course, they'd have to be incredibly bad human ASM programmers...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
to you and to the AC above.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
As soon as they finish I will port it to my Mac ..
Leave the moderating to the moderators.. gezzz :) hehe :)
VI and a toothpick
Anyway it's kinda related.. similer effort from an older time.. and it's kinda cool
Personally thies efforts are neat.. Lunix for the Commodore 64 has a specal place in my heart.. shure I can't use the 64 as a Unix workstation but the whole idea of putting Unix on such an old computer is cool.
All of thies reduced efforts are kinda neat and remind us that operating systems don't have to take up 16 meg ram and 1 gig HD.
We shall see if this heads anywhere..
Maybe once it's done we can port it to wearables [many of whom do use Intel chips] or port to other chipsets...
I don't actually exist.
Too many of you alleged 'nerds' have to learn that assembly language is WHERE IT IS AT; a core kernel of whatever design written in hand optimised assembly will rear up and piss all over the gooey mess which comes from the rear end of an optimising compiler 100% of the time! So what if it isn't portable? Its SMALL ENOUGH to rewrite! Its probably more secure than openBSD too ...
...writing an entire system or application in x86 assembly these days. Ever see what a good C/C++ compiler can turn out (even *gasp* MSVC?) Unless you're writing a software 3D rasterizer or specialized SIMD-targeted DSP-style application, you're only wasting brain cycles by using assembly. The 6502 is dead, get over it already.
So will this do anything to my computer running Win98. Does it just reside in memory only, ready to disappear with the next restart?
not just speed. asm programs are *at least* always twice as small as compiled programs.
Assembler/machine language is alive, well, and thriving in your monitor, keyboard controller, car computers, microwave oven, TV, VCR, stereo, modems, etc. In short, there is a large subculture out there using nothing else.
I started on 8080 machine language. Yes it can be ugly but making it work can be a real thrill. Kudos to those who can pull off an OS using it.
Maybe once it's done we can port it to wearables [many of whom do use Intel chips] or port to other chipsets...
You should have actually *read* the developer information.
I did.
This OS is hopelessly tied to the x86 and Standard (PoS) PC Architecture (you know, the one with the crap bios and the incredibly S-T-U-P-I-D partition table scheme and ridiculous realmode - yes, you *still* need realmode to program some of the PC hardware - and protected mode environments, not to mention that pathetic excuse of an interrupt system, I mean come on! Do we really need to cling to those outdated PICs anyway?)
...
But I digress...
I must admit that an OS as tiny as this is a wonderful feat, but unfortunately it is stuck with the 386+ PC architecture, and contains a fair number of outdated notions (such as holding on to the 3 char extensions for some odd reason), setting the maximum number of files a disk can hold at format time (instead of just growing the file index table from the back of the partition or some other clever scheme that wouldn't cost in access time), and a few other things.
I've also noticed a fair amount of pollution in the system32 services for fairly frivolous things, as well as a seeming lack of vision for the future in their design.
But these are only minor anoyances that we all live to deal with because those of us who could do better usually just can't be bothered.
Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, don't expect to see V2OS in anything other than a 386+ PC.
Personally, I can't understand why this project exists. Speed? Hardware is fast, it's always getting faster, and existing operating systems are as fast as you make them. Being the speed king matters for all of 7 months, when Intel releases a new revision of their processor that negates all your hard hacking. Well, if they're having fun writing it, I guess it has a place.
Uh, for fun?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It think that comments like that (being negative and stuff) could be very destructive to this kind of project. Why don't be a little more constructive and mature of course.
I don't know about vc6, but vc5 defaults to 4,096 bytes. For a standard console prog, I need to write quite a bit before it gets over 4k. Strangly, however I've never seen it get less then 4k.
When you make a windows program, you're going to have to put in *a lot* of code to manage windows/etc
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Saying that Linux is outselling the Mac is no more relevant than saying that Netscape Navigator is outselling the Mac. Both of them can be had for free and both of them will run on the Mac. There are a growing number of Linux distributions for the PPC that will run on Apple Macintosh's, for example, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux and Turbolinux.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I strongly suspect that the number of people using a Mac as their primary OS outweighs, by far, the number of people using Linux as their primary OS. (Primary being the one they spend the majority of their computing time using).
Anyways, this is comparing (no pun intended) apples to oranges. Someone running NT on their computer is one person who's NOT running MacOS. The same is not necissarily true for Linux. (I run MacOS and Yellow Dog Linux on my G3 Laptop)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It may be writen in assembly.. and they may have put some effort into optimising it.. but I doubt they have put they have put the kind of effort that some other people have. There was one project a long time ago where this guy wrote a microkernel which used self modifing code (well actually just higher order functions) to beat out all the monolithic kerenls---instead of giving you a file handle it gave you a whole set of functions which were optimised for the way you opened the file. I think the guy achieved an order of magnitude speed increase. The coolest thing about this aproach was that most of it could have been done in a high level langauge that supportted higher order functions.
What this all means for this guy is: Assembler is not the answer to over all high speed.. compilers which allow you to take advantage of self modifing code in a structured way would be the really fast solution. Unfortunatly, people generally do not add higher order functions to fast imperitive langauge like C.
I should mention that there may be a programmer time cost associated to using these sorts of tricks in an imperitive langauge, but the functional langauges which allow the programmer to seamlessly take advantage of these things generally have other compiler problems, but it is possible that one day the functional programmers will langauge at how slow everybody elses code is because their compilers can do tricks like this and everybody else has to do a lot more work to get the same things.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Sure thing brother, keep dreamin.
This kind of changes things, but I guess now we won't have people complaining about 'karma whoreing'. or whatever. I mean, after you get 30, who really cares?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If Java was the language of 1997, Visual Basic the language of 1998, then assembly language was the language of 1999. Everyone's writing in assembly these days probably because we've seen the age of large monolithic applications come and go. Today's marketing craze is small size.
Why are you bashing this? .h files...
It isn't going to take any market share from linux.
Besides, it's always good to have small, fast OS's... when all of you are thinking about wickedly fast programs on your P6's, I'm thinking about running wicked demos on my 486/33. I'm thinking about true assembler programming... giving the CPU direct opcodes instead of reffering to things that refer to things that refer to
Linux is great, but i'll always appreciate a true, lean OS.
Well there may still be uses for it. For instance, going back to that FREEVMWARE that was slashdoted a few days ago. They mention that they had to code their own little OS to test their code. This seems to be the perfect little OS to test and develop FREEVMWARE on/with. There is always use for some thing new.