Another Free Operating System: NewOS

JigSaw writes: "Is the world ready for yet another Operating System? Travis Geiselbrecht, an ex-BeOS kernel engineer, seems to think so. (He is actually the one who wrote the Linux ext2 filesystem add-on for BeOS). He recently put up on his web site his personal Operating System, NewOS, with full source code. The OS was written from scratch and it is very modern and powerful as you can see from its feature set. It currently runs on x86 and... Sega Dreamcast but he is planning ports for Alpha, SGI and Sun Blade machines in the near future."

Re:Very nice

Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?

Why port to Sega Dreamcast? Why run linux on a Sparc? Why do this? Why do that?

I'm sick and tired of questions like these. For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun? Obviously, this guy has fun doing it or he wouldn't. So why not port your personal operating system to a Dreamcast?

Heck, my pc came with its own OS already. Why did I dump it in favor of Debian? Because I like Linux and I don't like Windows. Linux is fun.

Obviously not ready for military use.

"Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality."

To conform to mil-spec, that line would have to be changed to "hooah!"... :-)

Use your own OS...

Isn't it funny how many developers can write their own unix-like-OS, yet a whole team of developers haven't yet fully implement the windows 32 bit libraries of top of linux?

Re:oh yeah...

Well truthefully the hurd is still going, although it is moving slowly, it is functional. Atheos is in the same boat.

If this person can create a new OS kernel that is faster than BSD, Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc, and can replace lets say the Linux kernel .. then he has a big chance at success. The fact is that if you can create a new kernel like what the hurd is doing and to have it work as a drop in replacement into lets say the Linux kernel then he can have success. Ideally if he had a micro kernel that could actually run some of linux drivers with little modification he could go somewhere.

I doubt it, I think Linux is having enough trouble surviving and I think that the effort of the hurd, atheos, beos, and him could be better spent in improving an existing system, like Linux, (one of the BSD's), or any other Open Source OS.

just my opinion though.

good luck guy..............

I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!

Re:Is Open Source getting too scattered?

Is Open Source getting too scattered? No. That's the point of it. Consider the hill-climbing problem. If you want to avoid a local maximum, what you do is start your hill-climber at several different points. Lots of climbers is better than a few smart ones. Each one just heads up-hill, and then when it reaches a point where every direction is down-hill, it says "I'm at the top."

To find the highest point you can reach, you survey the climbers, and choose the highest. If you don't think that he's at the top, you take all of the lower ones (that have finished climbing) and randomly redistribute them.

This can be fine tuned, but that's the idea. And that' open source development. Lots of developers starting in lots of different places, and heading uphill. (Well, you can see that it's really a bit more complex, but that's one valid abstraction of the process.)


Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.

Re:Not GPL...

It isn't based on the BSD license. It is the BSD license!

Re:Okay, this is ridiculous...

Oh, open source sandwiches definitely make sense!

If there's a roach in a proprietary Microsoft BLT, you won't know about it until you've swallowed it and contracted some horrible disease. With open source sandwiches, you can send your changes back to the developer.

Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.

darius

never call anything 'new' ....

if it takes off 10 years from now you'll be sorry ....

Issues with being from Be

I am also currently working on my own hobby Open Source OS, and have considered a job at Be after I graduate, doing kernel level stuff. The thing I was concerned about was Be reacting to my involvement in an Open Source project where I might feel compelled to implement similar solutions to the BeOS kernel, and thus leak Be's trade secrets. I am sure this would be a serious issue for someone in my position, but I wonder, as an ex-employee, whether the author of this OS has received any heat from his former employer.

Other OSes in development

I don't find this to terribly new. There are literally hundreds of OS projects like this one, at various stages of completion. Read alt.os.development sometime, there are plenty of brilliant people toiling away on their hobby operating systems. Recently the developer (or someone pushing it) posted a link to this OS on the newsgroup, but the page was in Italian or Portugese. Needless to say, good way to frustrate a bunch of OS developers!

For some info on developing your own OS check out:

http://www.execpc.com/~geezer/os/

Is just one of the regulars (well not too regular these days) on the newsgroup. The "Triple Fault Club" is kind of funny actually. Everyone's OS has flummoxed many a frustrated x86 processor at some point! From his site I learned some of the ropes. Also check out some of the sites on the webring. Many OSes, varying from toys to useable systems.

BTW, people on the newsgroup generally sneer at any OS named ____OS or ___ix. There are so many ChrisOS, and DaveOS, and Winix and Finix and Pukenix, etc...

But of course there is MacOS and Linux...

Re:NewOS running on defunct hardware!

MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)

haha, this is so funny because i think you're actually serious. there are shitloads of companies suporting the MIPS processor and it's extrememly popular in the embedded market. there are a hel of a lot of devices that you probably use on a daily basis that use a MIPS processor, not to mention all the Cisco equipment this message passes through to get to you.

for a group that's supposedly in tune with technology it suprises me how many of the slashbots are so unbelieveably igornant. if it's not a PC it doesn't matter i guess. hah.

- j

Jung's "Collection Unconscious?"

Hmm. I wonder if this could be an effect of the "Collective Unconscious" that C.G. Jung postulates in his book "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." Perhaps not only have we been made aware that it's possible to roll our own OS, but the collective unconscious of the developer community is more geared toward doing it these days. I was kicking around what it would take to roll one as a conceptual exercise the other day and it's really not as horrid as you might think it is, the trick being to start small.

If it is a "collective unconscious" thing though, that's going to blow a personal hypothesis of mine out of the water; that being that the collective unconscious (if it even exists) is primarily a genetic race memory thing. The explosion of knowledge that we're seeing in this field would tend to point to other factors.

YAFOS ?

Yet Another Free OS ? Well kind of, as there are already quite a few [freeos.com] existing already, looks like the guy has fun developping it so that's cool, but I don't think he expects much from this.

As was noted by someone, he doesn't seem to ask for help either, so I think that sums it up quite well.

Still, this is nice but I'm not sure it's stuff that matters© that much. Oh well...

Anytime

Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality.

int main()
{

int fd;
size_t len;
char c;

printf("test\n");

printf("my thread id is %d\n", sys_get_current_thread_id());

printf("enter something: ");

for(;;) {
c = getc();
printf("%c", c);
}

for(;;) {
sys_snooze(1000000);
printf("booyah!");
}

for(;;);
return 0;
}

This was taken from main.c and is:

/*
** Copyright 2001, Travis Geiselbrecht.
** All rights reserved.

--

NewOS running on defunct hardware!

Half of those systems are now obsolete!

• Atari
• Dreamcast
• Amiga (it's dead, face it!)
• MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)

At least there's no PowerPC port. That would be a bad omen for Apple!

By the way, this isn't troll...I'm just stating an obvious anachronism.

Ryan Finley

Re:Very nice

Why not? The Dreamcast is cheap and very well documented. It's a de facto open system.

/Brian

NewOS

NewOS's name is funny. In Hindu, "New Oh Ess" or "Newoess" means "one who makes false promises."

Sort of funny. Like how CIPA (Children's Online Protection Act) means "pussy" in Swedish.
------------

No mention of "help wanted"

Curious, this guy makes no mention of wanting any developer help. This reminds me of the guy making AtheOS [atheos.com]. I am absolutely amazed at the ability for one developer to whip up something so quickly - within months. The coding talent and drive to create these small OSes is incredible. Considering much smaller applications easily have dozens of developers, the idea of creating an OS from scratch with multiprocessor and multithreading support is unbelievable. Perhaps they used some code or ideas from other open source kernels, but hey, that's what open source is all about.

Even if neither of these OSes take off, I admire their drive to focus this well as a solo developer.

division

*sigh* Another day, another partitiion on my hard drive.... what's that, now 5?

Re:OSkit

Oops. Although the link I gave you would take you there (google search), I copied and pasted out of the wrong browser window. Stupid me.

Here [utah.edu] is the real link just in case....

--
Garett

Re:Is Open Source getting too scattered?

However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly.

You're missing the point. The coolest thing you can possibly do in geekworld is to write your own OS. This guy is just having FUN! He doesn't want to concentrate on the OS you want him to concentrate on. He wants to be creative and come up with his own thing.

Okay, this is ridiculous...

Many thanks goes out to the people at Perforce for making such a good revision control system, the developers at OpenBLT for giving me some ideas, and Be for giving me such a good development platform.

Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!

Where does it all stop? Why? WHYYYYYY?!?!?!

(sorry)

Re:feature set.

looks like "High-performance TCP/IP stack" is a planned feature

That's pretty cool. I was thinking of implementing a "packet-losing, barely functional TCP/IP stack" with the upcoming SantaOS, but I may have to change my strategy now that someone's come along and promised better...

Dancin Santa

Re:Use your own OS...

Well, the closer you get to the users, the more complex things get... never mind the feature involved. The Win32 libraries include everything from the base file system things to sound libraries to MIDI support to all the UI widgets to networking to printer support to ...

There's a lot in there. Somethings haven't really been done on built-from-scratch UNIX environments, never mind trying to emulate exactly what Microsoft did...
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Not at all surprising.

Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.

As far as I can see, there are only two extremely difficult (read: time-consuming, tedious) things to do re something as familiar and well-defined as an OS: comply fully with someone else's standard, and tune an entirely original design (not borrowing the main character from a familiar system).

Making a unix-like OS is not much harder than making a compiler for a c-like language (I dunno about you, but I could do the latter in a couple of days). But then supplying every library routine and going and checking that you comply with the POSIX standard on every point would take forever (alone, that is).

The win32 thing is a hundred times harder than that, because it's a huge, poorly designed, inaccurately specified, buggy interface. It's painful enough to even use that the vast majority of windows programmers hide it behind some other tool. Recreating it perfectly, without access to the source, is an exercise in futility, far harder than making it in the first place.
--

Re:NewOS

CIPA does not mean "pussy" in Swedish !
Perhaps you meant Polish where cipa indeed means "pussy" ...

Is Open Source getting too scattered?

By far one of the greatest things about open source is that anyone has the opportunity to go out and build whatever they want. This adds to the mix and to the overall quality of the products. However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly. I'm not looking to get blasted with why having many different OSs do different things is good, because I know that. I'm just raising a question that seems to have faded from the open source community's mind.