Submitted by “The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable.”
Well, i never heard about the HelenOS before today and i’am glad to see people still interested to develop an OS project from scratch.
Good luck guys !
At last a new operating system written from scratch and not another unix variant, new fresh air for the world of operating systems
I hope that as is developed from scratch it not repeat the limitations and errors of current Operating systems
I also hope that it does repeat the successes of current operative systems – too often, people write new OS to “fix the problems of UNIX” and then they fall in the stupid error of avoiding everything that looks like Unix, even if it’s good (and there’re a lot of good things in unix).
That said, if a OS like Plan9 isn’t getting mainstream, I very much doubt any other research OS will have better success.
Edited 2007-08-16 18:49
i kinda recall plan9 not being free (in both sense of the word) until recently. so im not surprised that it didnt go mainstream.
still, there seems to be more and more stuff from it showing up in linux. i recall reading about p9fs or whatever its called, and maybe that network protocol to.
Edited 2007-08-16 19:16
According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Its opensource and released under the Lucent OpenSource Licence.
As for its lack there of success, it really hasn’t marketed itself, its hardware support is lacking, and the availability of software is also lacking.
Edited 2007-08-16 21:01
yes, now it is, but i wasn’t until the late ’90s-’00s that it became open/gratis.
True, but there needs to be a momentum started – but quite honestly I don’t think computers in the traditional sense are all that exciting; the future is mobility, that is where the focus should be; we will still need operating systems like Solaris/Linux but the big money and focus will be on multifunctional devices like smart mobile phones etc.
and there you also find linux.
hell, i picked up a cheap nokia 770 “web tablet” not to long ago, running linux.
and here is a article about how linux came to appear on mobile phones:
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2590177877.html
hell, im using pidgin (formerly gaim) as the im client on my 770. the same im client thats part of the gnome desktop iirc. to me that shows the power of open source, and the moldabillity of the linux “ecosystem”.
when you have that kind of portability things get interesting to say the least
Although perhaps it’s molded a little too much.
specifics?
The specifics is that linux is micro-optimised for servers. Yes it supports a lot of embedded architectures but rather half-heartedly. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I doubt any other existing open source OS can do any better than linux. But I think molding PC or server OS’es for embedded systems doesn’t work very well.
well it works fine by my experience.
and there seems to be a good deal of the real-time stuff, that i guess is used on such a device, is being moved to the main kernel tree.
remember, while there is a lot of stuff in the kernel, you can turn on and of what will be compiled depending on your need.
so its not like you hit compile and its the same kernel that pops out each and every time.
i would hazard a guess that its more that the same in say the windows kernel between xp and 2003 then what is different. the only place where mircosoft seems to have gone radical is on the wince/pocketpc os…
and one can question why.
Yes you can configure things in the kernel. But the problem is that the amount of irrelevant things you deal with almost outweigh the relevant things for an embedded platform. For example, the linux virtual memory subsystem, the ide subsystem, etc. are hard to grasp. But I bet, you can write a slab+buddy or similar allocator for your need in a few thousand lines of code. Same goes for disk support, filesystems, (almost only relevant flash filesystem nowadays is LogFS = ~1000 loc) etc. So the conclusion is embedded linux support is good, but given all the effort and complexity it might be worth starting from scratch. 😉
well im not going to, but it seems people already are working on it, and have done so for some time.
why they are doing it i have no idea, but it seems they think its worth their time and effort.
There are plenty of “new” OSes not based on any others. This one looks interesting because its license is BSD.
We’ll see how things come along.
This sounds like NetBSD with a microkernel.
another microkernel 🙂
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Let’s spend a few years talking about whether we should port to it instead of developing anything. 🙂
Is the source code written in Greek?
*ducks and rolls*
Interesting little OS; I’ll have to poke around after the move and see what can be done with it. There’s a few GPL sections, but those can be easily solved.
Most of the interesting under-the-hood stuff is described here:
http://www.helenos.eu/doc/design/html.chunked/
Nevermind
Edited 2007-08-17 01:32
it is very interesting project, i did not hear about it earlier. now downloading live cd
http://prevedgame.ru/in.php?id=20508