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/aosg/ Alternative Operating System General

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Because it's fun to think about what could have been or what might be.

After a thread on /g/, one anon expressed an interest to turn this into a general, and here are some notes to keep to build up a FAQ.

Threads

OP has not yet mastered 4chan posting, so there is as yet no easy way to locate old threads. Manual list:

List of Notable Alternative Operating Systems

Operating Systems for Amiga

Plan 9 Family

OS Written in Assembly

  • https://www.menuetos.net MenuetOS, an operating system written entirely in assembly complete with a GUI. Not all is open source
  • http://www.kolibrios.org/en/ KolibriOS is a free fork of MenuetOS. KolibriOS is very small - The kernel and most of the programs fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk.

Educational OS

Microkernels

The idea is to minimise the kernel and have all services running as services at lower privileges and in a way that the services can be restarted after a crash. Microkernels often work by message passing, and that can cause an overhead. Mach had major performance issues.

  • Exec (Amiga) - the Executive at the deepest level of Amiga OS is a microkernel
  • Minix is famously microkernel based and the author, Tanenbaum, slogged it out with Linux Torvalds and his decision to make Linux a monolithic kernel rather than a microkernel based OS
  • Magenta, based on Little Kernel and later renamed into Zircon - this powers Fuchsia
  • Mach, later GNU Mach - chosen to power HURD.
  • L4 is a family of microkernels

L4 Family of Microkernels

There are many members, the most important are:

  • L4 - can run Linux variants such as L4Linux
  • seL4 - high security microkernel

Emulators

A full install, or even a live CD, is not necessarily needed, sincfe there are emulators.

Misc

Resources for OSDEV

/aosg/ Book Club