Guest post by The lead developer of a niche ARM-powered OS has written a string of in-depth articles on the design, implementation and testing of a commercial operating system. Justin Fletcher was the architect of versions of 4 and 6 of RISC OS, the ARM processor’s original operating system. Although his pieces will be best appreciated by RISC OS and Acorn users old and new, the series is a fantastic insight into operating system design: check out his build system for compiling code into ROM images, the abstraction of video graphics from a legacy 1980s-era kernel, converting images on the fly, testing and debugging, executing applications and plenty more. Justin has written tens of thousands of words and will be publishing new pieces daily online and in Android and iOS-friendly formats.
Something like HTML and EPUB? It sounds like interesting information, just hoping this doesn’t turn into some ‘monetization’ scheme where you have to download a frikkin’ app to get the content.
I’m pretty sure Justin has no intention to do anything like that; it’s more about documenting about 10 years of work and getting 100,000 words off his chest. RISC OS does stuff differently to other OSes, so any dev looking for ideas could check it out. It’s all online to read as HTML or via Google Currents for free.
Edited 2013-01-22 10:42 UTC
I just re-read my comment and I see it makes me sound like a bit of a jerk. Way to go, Justin, if he’s just publishing HTML then. I am repeatedly annoyed by content that gets wrapped up into an app or some nonsense that makes it hard to read and share.
And the subject matter is interesting too, so I’ll be excited to read it. Anything but boring-old-x86 is interesting stuff.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking. The site is just webpages – pretty regular HTML – so I would assume that it’s as accessible to Android and iOS devices equally well, although I have neither to test. I believe that plain HTML provides the maximum accessibility for different devices.
As you will see on the site, there is both the web page, the RSS and Atom feeds for summaries, and a ‘full text of the last 5 days’ RSS feed. Additionally, there’s a Google Currents published version of the content at http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowva34Bg/gerphs_risc_os_r… if you prefer that to RSS feeds.
I have a Kindle version of the rambles, but I shaln’t be publishing it until the complete rambles have been published on the site. A Kindle document would fix the version, and I would prefer to have edited everything before it is published in such a way.
A PDF version would be awesome! I’d also love to see an iBooks version and creating a free file is pretty trivial if you have access to a Mac.
I’m not a great fan of the direction RISCOS went (I mostly used version 2.0 on the A3xx and A4xx lines at college, plus we had an A3000 at home, but I’ve use v3.7 and later and hated it.) But these articles at brilliant! Great find!
They could have easily become the kings of the professional operating systems that are both legendary, fast, well-thought and extensible … BUT … they’re not open source, and this will make their life miserable at best. At worse they can just dissapear, like BeOS. Then we will get some rewrite of the RISCOS code after several years of unnessesarily doubled work.
Come on people, wake up. Open source your stuff. It’s not 1980s. The model has changed. Open source works and closed source doesn’t work. And that won’t change, because if you get a taste of the freedom once, you won’t give it away anymore.
You can be either loved by the small group of enthusiasts with big wallets, or by the huge group of enthusiasts willing to pay for support and help. Don’t be a prick, for f#@#$’s sake.
Open source wouldn’t have paid the bills, for me, and closed source barely did – closed source being a requirement of the license. There are those who have a great regard for open source, and honour the agreements that are in place. There are others who don’t, and have to be put in their place. But whatever the ideologies, I still try to keep from being insulting to others that have a different viewpoint.
Sorry if that insults you. I admit I went a little bit too far. I’m kinda grumpy in the morning hours
Anyway, I do think that FLOSS is the presence and the future, but I accept the ones that are willing to stay with the closed source model. It’s their choice [with their profit or loss].
Best regards
Another lineage of RISC OS is moderately ~open: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#Post-Acorn_developm… (even if apparently messy at times http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISCOS_Ltd#License_dispute )
…which doesn’t mean “the kings of the professional operating systems that are both legendary, fast, well-thought and extensible” – RISC OS just isn’t that good, it seems.