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Operating systems

An operating system is a program that manages a computer's programs and applications.
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Rust oxide.computer

An embedded OS all in Rust

Bryan Cantrill, announcing Hubris and Humility:

… we found ourselves increasingly forcing existing systems out of the comfort of their design centers, we wondered: was our assumption of using an existing system wrong? Should we in fact be exploring our own de novo operating system? In particular, our colleague Cliff Biffle, who had a ton of experience with both Rust and embedded systems, had a vision for what such a system might look like (namely, the system that he had always wanted for himself!). Cliff dove into a sketch of his ideas, giving the nascent system a name that felt perfectly apt: Hubris.

There’s some serious innovation going on at Oxide and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Ars Technica Icon Ars Technica

SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ’90s

SerenityOS looks like a nostalgia-focused Linux distro, but it ain’t. All I have to say about this project (for now) is: wow

According to founding SerenityOS developer Andreas Kling, there is absolutely no third-party code in SerenityOS. “When we started,” Kling told Ars, “we imported four or five C standard library functions from NetBSD or something like that. But those were gotten rid of over time. We’re free of third-party code now, with the exception of the build process.”

SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ’90s

macOS github.com

A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD

A new open-source desktop operating system that aims to provide a similar experience and compatibility with macOS on x86-64 systems. It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD, existing open source packages in the same space, and new code to fill the gaps. Airyx aims to feel sleek, stable, familiar and intuitive, handle your daily tasks, and provide as much compatibility as possible with the commercial OS that inspired it.

This is largely the effort of one hacker in her spare time. It’s still early days, which she admits in a tweet:

For the record, I know how much airyx.org sucks rn and I’m working on it Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joy Be patient.

Gotta respect the ambition on display here. Go get it, Zoë! 💪

Go github.com

A Go unikernel running on x86 bare metal

Run a single Go applications on x86 bare metal, written entirely in Go (only a small amount of C and some assembly), support most features of Go (like GC, goroutine) and standard libraries, also come with a network stack that can run most net based libraries.

The entire kernel is a go application running on ring0. There are no processes and process synchronization primitives, only goroutines and channels. There is no elf loader, but there is a Javascript interpreter that can run js script files, and a WASM interpreter will be added to run WASM files later.

Goroutines correspond to processes and channels are used for inter-process communication (IPC). Also it runs JavaScript ¯\(ツ)

Security osquery.io

Query your OS like a database

osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.

osquery> SELECT name, path, pid FROM processes WHERE on_disk = 0;
name = Drop_Agent
path = /Users/jim/bin/dropage
pid = 561

History versionmuseum.com

A visual history of your favorite tech

Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives.

I freakin’ love this site. They have quite a collection here, everything from Amazon.com and Google Maps to Mac OS and Super Mario Kart. Version 1.5 of Microsoft Excel was dope! (full Excel history here)

A visual history of your favorite tech

Go github.com

Biscuit – a research OS written in Go

Biscuit is a monolithic, POSIX-subset operating system kernel in Go for x86-64 CPUs. It was written to study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel with a common style of architecture.

With ~38k commits and 8+ years of dev, this has been a massive effort. Find the research paper right here.

Bash github.com

A command-line system information tool written in bash 3.2+

The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system. Neofetch shows the information other people want to see. There are other tools available for proper system statistic/diagnostics.

Supports almost 150 different operating systems, so odds are it has you covered. Check my results below. Pretty decent uptime for a laptop, no?

A command-line system information tool written in bash 3.2+

Learn github.com

Learn OS development using the Linux kernel and a Raspberry Pi

This repository contains a step-by-step guide that teaches how to create a simple operating system (OS) kernel from scratch. I call this OS Raspberry Pi OS or just RPi OS. The RPi OS source code is largely based on Linux kernel, but the OS has very limited functionality and supports only Raspberry PI 3.

6 lessons available with 5 more on the roadmap.

Lachlan Sneff github.com

An operating system that executes WebAssembly in ring 0

It’s a reimagining of the Singularity OS of old, using new technologies like WebAssembly and Rust. Using an intermediate language as a compile target for applications allows for architecture agnosticism and interesting optimizations that would not be possible on conventional OSes.

Here’s to the crazy ones. 🍻

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #280

Building a Secure Operating System with Rust

We talked with Jeremy Soller, the BDFL of Redox OS, a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications. In this episode we talk about; OS design principals, Jeremy’s goals for Redox, why is Rust, the Micro-kernel, the Filesystem, how Linux isn’t secure enough, how he’s funding this his development, and a coding style in Rust called Safe Rust.

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