Odograph.com

Chris Giese released a new version of Cosmos yesterday. Now it comes with Space Invaders! His page is great, not just for the small OS, but also for a lot of good links.

I started this log with a reference to Rob Pike’s talk on why “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant.” I think I’m now finding the situation a little less dire. There are a continuing stream of academic projects, hobby projects, and an increasing synergy between the two.

Unununium (homepage, sourceforge) is one of the more interesting (and strange) examples of that synergy.

Having fun

Hey, I’m enjoying this stuff again. ;-)

Two valuable resources for OS building are grub and the
OSKit. They each imply a certain structure about the OS being built, but both bring tons of utility along with that.

Two L4 implementations for x86 are Hazelnut and Fiasco. Of the two, Hazelnut looks a little more accessable (and active).

Component Based OSes

I found another one, 2k (in their words):

Our research seeks to modify resource management in operating systems to accommodate frequent change. By identifying key technologies and approaches to support frequent update, by emphasizing user- and application-orientation, and by focusing on application and resource aware, network-centric architectures, this project shifts the emphasis of operating system design from more traditional resource management to the management of dynamically changing distributed resources within rapidly changing user environments.

This sounds pretty close to the “upgrade” issue I find so interesting.

A alt.os.development denizen helped me find something I had been looking at a year ago. His page has a lot of great links on OS development topics. Including …

Component Based OSes

GO! OS and the Pebble OS seem very close to the component and OS ideas I’ve been considering. They look to be good areas for study.