http://www.osnews.com/story/141/Operating_Systems_Scene_Back_to_Full_Activity Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:45:54 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? There is always ReactOS and NewOS of course, but they are a bit more above the niche, as they are more well known as the OSes I described above. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 15:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? There is also PETROS by Trumpet Software
http://www.petros-project.com/

Good to see you back and busy.....
Cliff Beach Fri, 05 Oct 2001 16:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? There is also AROS... a project that basically is a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 from scratch, portable at least to ix86, powerpc and m68k architectures. They've been at it for the last several years, and show no signs of quitting or stagnating. Workbench is not yet functional, but many programs have been ported. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? You didn't mention L4 http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/, EROS http://www.eros-os.org/, FLUX http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/ Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://tinyos.millennium.berkeley.edu/ Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? QNX is my current favorite non-MS OS, now that it is available for free for non-commercial purposes. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Askemos defines a distributed virtual machine using byzantine protocols. Works on xml document level and most importantly without central authority/administration. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? This is UNIX (or its variants Lynux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX) distilled into
its escense. The use interface work by Rob Pike: ACME and Plumbing and quite
amazing. Instead of the GNOME/MONO fascination with cloning the Windows ways,
the original father of UNIX (Ken Thompson and friends) show how far the original
UNIX envelope can be pushed into networks and user interfaces without creating
a Windows like enchilada. REALLY AMAZING stuff, if you really want to learn
from real OS Artists, this is it. This is of course an OS by developers for
developers, not end users. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? >You didn't mention L4 http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/, EROS http://www.eros-os.org/, FLUX http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux

Eros is pretty much dead, being full of documents but little actual code while I left OUT *intentionally* the Research/University OSes. I tried to include only personal/team efforts for this article. I am a romantic I can say...

As for TinyOS and Askemos, I know about them, their Sourceforge web page links are either dead of they have not shown activity lately. Don't forget that I only included OSes with good activity rate. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Tunes is very promising operating system. It is the _most_ promising in my mind. Basically, they are taking all of the best elements of current OS research and implementing them all together into one OS. For example, instead of having a filesystem, data and programs are stored as objects. There is no kernel (a la exokernel). The only semblance of a kernel is the hardware multiplexor. There will be a high-level language and a low-level language. To port the OS and all of its applications to a new architecture you simply port the low-level language. No more "fake" portability like unix, which sometimes can require a lot of coding.

For right now, it is only in the planning stage. No public code yet. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Visopsys (mine). 4 years in development. Multitasking, virtual memory, simple GUI, all that stuff...
http://visopsys.org/ Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? AdaOS http://adaos.org/ Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? kernel project for i386 since 1982
http://tropix.nce.ufrj.br (Portuguese) Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Roadrunner/pk

http://www.cornfed.com Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://uuu.sf.net/

if 92% of activity on sourceforge isn't enough, what is? Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? We have already made a news story about Unununium on OSNews a month ago (which btw is not a "real" OS), while the www.cornfed.com one looks interesting. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I've been disgusted with all the OS's I use and so I dropped back to study a system (not just an OS) from the great Niklaus Wirth: Oberon. Most of the concepts in the os' you mention were done extremely well in oberon a decade ago. Check it out. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? It's a shameless plug, as I'm the main developer, but feel free to check out XO/2 (http://xo2.org/), a real-time operating system written in the Oberon-2 language. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I'll be releasing version 1.0 of Vortex in a few months. Vortex is
designed to host server apps running on medium/large scale SMPs (IA-32).
Scalable event architecture, scalable asynch I/O architecture, scalable
memory architecture, robustness against DoS etc. etc. You have threads, processes, virtual memory, TCP, UDP, IPv4/IPv6, 100 Mbit ether, MyriNet ++++
The entire system has been implemented from scratch over a period
of 5 years. Promise you will find something new here. Just gotta finish
those last 100 pages on my PhD...

You can find more info at http://vserver.cs.uit.no/Vortex
These pages are quite outdated though... Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.jos.org/ Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? A AmigaOS binary compatible OS for the PowerPC. Was at one time being considered by Amiga Inc. as AmigaOS 4.0. MorphOS homepage

-Sam Dunham Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I can't remeber all the urls... Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? The EROS project has been moved to Johns Hopkins University, where I'm a student. While I am not working on the project myself, I have a friend who worked on the OS this summer along with 10-15 other students under Jonathan Shapiro's direction. (Shapiro is the head of the project and teaches the operating systems courses here.) Apparently things are happening with the OS, though I don't know many specifics as far as advances go. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? BozOS (http://bozos.sf.net) is another free operating system. The whole system it about 5% of the size of MS Notepad in my Win98 installation :-) Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? www.ecomstation.com

Runs DOS/Win3.1/Win9x/OS2/Linux/Unix applications. A heck of an operating system if you ask me.

It's not free, but well worth the price. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? HURD! Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? For a much more complete list of OSes checkout:
http://tunes.org/Review/OSes.html Fri, 05 Oct 2001 19:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? EROS (http://www.eros-os.org) is still alive. It's currently going through a massive re-write, and they're ripping out all the C++ code from the kernel (going back to C). It is the most recent attempt at a pure capability-based OS, and a follow-on to KeyKOS. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 20:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? EROS, mentioned by Matt Marsh, is the Extremely Reliable Operating System.
Web site is http://www.eros-os.org . I haven't followed it in a while, but some of my friends are very enthusiastic about it. It's based on Capabilities, which are authentication tokens that processes can hand each other, and which control access to everything on the system - If you don't have a capa, you can't do anything, so it's possible to build extremely secure operating systems. The file system does journaling, so if you have to reboot the machine, FSCKs are nearly-instantaneous. (I forget if it does conventional files or objects, but I remember that it does lots of checkpointing - failure recovery is really fast.) Fri, 05 Oct 2001 20:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I've been reading into the Metaprogramming language Pliant. at http://pliant.cx/ . It seems they are also developing an OS based upon the language. Looks like they do this on top of the linux kernel.

Interesting site. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 20:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? There is a project at a brazillian university for an OS *nix-like.
Tropix's page is in portuguese. Fri, 05 Oct 2001 21:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Homepage: www.atheos.cx (the web server runs on Atheos Fri, 05 Oct 2001 21:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? coldforth.teegra.net/

Multitasking, TCP/IP stack, assembler, compiler, interpreter. NFS telnet HTTP
server, routing. All in less than 512kbytes.

Self recompiles. Source in HTML ( see above URL) Fri, 05 Oct 2001 21:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Kurt seems to have assumed control of the project, which I still own??? Hows that?

http://gaztek.sourceforge.net

Is the real website!!
Also Kurt has made only tiny changes to it.

Thanks
Gareth Owen
GazOS Author Fri, 05 Oct 2001 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? there are
yamit - http://yamit.sourceforge.net
xMach - http://xMach.org Fri, 05 Oct 2001 22:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I have put together a web page that summarizes the links mentioned here today. The page is at www.cornfed.com/os.html.

FM Sat, 06 Oct 2001 00:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Hello Eugenia, hello Dave Remember me from #BeOS Eugenia? The website of Cefarix OS is gonna move and have a new look once I get the time. Keep up the work on this site Eugenia, and perhaps we can chat once again at #BeOS Sat, 06 Oct 2001 01:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? And don't forget SkyOS (http://www.skyos.org/). One heck of an operating system! Sat, 06 Oct 2001 01:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? AmigaOS hasa nich market. Quite a large one compared to some of the other OS's on this list, and no doubt will grow a lot bigger soon.

AROS was mentioned above. But what about MorphOS. Which was the attemp to bring AmigaOS to the PPC before Amiga Inc came on to the sceen and announced what their pans were.

AtheOS? I dont think i saw it mentioned there. ummm...
Yer, thats about it for me. Sat, 06 Oct 2001 04:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I'm surprised people are only posting about PC operating systems...
KallistiOS is a quite active project providing an embedded OS for hobbyist Dreamcast console development, and it'll probably spread to other platforms as time allows =) Sat, 06 Oct 2001 04:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? You only mentioned hobbyist toy OS. Have a look on current research systems, like:
- L4Ka, www.l4ka.org
- Sawmill Linux (multi-server OS on L4)
- GNU Hurd (multi-server OS on Mach or L4)
- Nemesis (QoS SASOS)
- Exokernel
- EROS (fast capability system, www.eros.org)

to name a few.

Have a look at the SOSP proceedings of the last years. Sat, 06 Oct 2001 08:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Now our OS support multiple address space (process) and a first user-level program has been run in version 0.7.10 Any help from any kind is welcome. Visit us on http://clicker.sourceforge.net Sat, 06 Oct 2001 08:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? What all about ecomstation?
Does it run natively on an x86? or it's running on top of OS/2? Sat, 06 Oct 2001 21:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? AFAIK Ecomstation _is_ OS/2 Sun, 07 Oct 2001 01:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I am still working on Self/R (previously known as Merlin), a reflective operating system based on the pure object oriented language Self. Since I am doing other things at the same time, such as designing hardware and a new processor architecture, results are still a few months away.

http://www.merlintec.com Mon, 08 Oct 2001 22:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? if not, try http://www.riscos.com .. still very active. Runs on RiscPCs (running (strong)ARM CPU). Tue, 09 Oct 2001 12:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? IMO one of the most underrated OS-es .. shame it was scrapped by Apple Tue, 09 Oct 2001 12:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? SPIN,
Scout,
2k,
GO,
ShawnOS,
NachOS,
Paramecium,
Amber,
uOS,
VINO,
(some of them may be shown in earlier posts) and a very interesting
page. Sun, 14 Oct 2001 20:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments