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Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

blog.minocacorp.com

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Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#121

Post by caf »

JasonSage wrote: post #85
barbs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems that for any operating system to be successful, it has to carry around POSIX compatibility like an extremely expensive entry pass. Curious - what are your main objections with POSIX? Is there another system you prefer?

I mean, it sounds like his objection is that an operating system that doesn't have POSIX compatibility is dismissed out of hand. If we think of POSIX compatibility as something which is required in order for an operating system to be viable at any level, it means that there's a lot of energy in pioneering a new OS devoted to building up this compatibility simply so it can get some exposure. If we really want to encou…

I think if you were building an OS an an academic research exercise and publishing papers based on it, no-one would object to your results on the basis of a lack of POSIX compatibility.

The criteria is different if you're writing an OS for practical use with wide adoption, though. There, backward-compatibility is rightly considered a positive attribute - there is much existing software in the world, and the entire point of a practical OS is after all to run the software that people use.

Exactly the same situation exists with CPUs. If you come up with a new micro-architecture that you actually want to sell to customers, you'd better come to the party with a C compiler and a ported OS or three.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#122

Post by [deleted] »

cpeterso wrote: post #90
pavlov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the initial capital on local variable names? I don't think I've ever seen that in C code. (Usually types and exported functions are capitalized.) It kind of makes the code look like Pascal. Nothing wrong with that, really.

This looks like the NT kernel coding style, especially with the pointless typedefs for things like PVOID and the PascalCased function names with prefixes like `IopPerformIoOperation`. I looked up the Minoca founders on Linked In and, behold, they both worked as engineers on the Windows NT team. :)

[deleted]

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#123

Post by anta40 »

http://www.minocacorp.com/community/

Windows Environment - If you're looking to develop on Windows, you may find this repository helpful, as it contains a native MinGW compiler, make, and other tools needed to set up a Minoca OS development environment on Windows.

Nice to see that development on Windows is supported :)

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#124

Post by bluejekyll »

tssva wrote: post #119
jprzybyl wrote: post #80

I'm very excited about this! Minoca is an interesting system, and I applaud any attempt to make driver-writing less inherently horrible. Minoca OS has been around for a while, but the news is that they're GPLv3. I think that's a great thing! The MIT license is good for software that wants to permeate through everything , but for building a community, the GPL is a good idea. It seems that for any operating system to b…

Microsoft has produced several successful operating systems without POSIX compatibility.

Not quite accurate: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754351(v=ws.11...

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#125

Post by throwawaysjshs »

SysArchitect wrote: post #70
cturner wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt this way as well (since the mid nineties) until a couple of weeks ago when I read _Social Architecture_ by Pieter Hintjens. It has a strong idealogical flavour. He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. For that reason, you want GPL because it forces everything back into the community. He gives examples of a friend of his who…

> He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. Exactly, so license shouldn't matter that much. I'd probably be a lot more interested in it were it BSD licensed, as it is now I have no real desire to play with this new OS.

Can you explain why you prefer BSD as a contributer (I'm assuming you're not running an OS company) so much that you won't help a GPL project?

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#126

Post by wtallis »

pdonis wrote: post #120
dom0 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main issues with POSIX are: - (Correct) IO is ridiculously non-portable and painful in so many ways that it isn't even funny anymore - Locks are ridiculously non-portable and painful to the point where you're better off just using "mkdir" - POSIX is stuck in the "everything is bytes and we slap an encoding on it some of the time" era thinking. This makes it painful and hard to implement proper text handli…

> POSIX is stuck in the "everything is bytes and we slap an encoding on it some of the time" era thinking. I actually view this as a feature. Encoding/decoding of data should be an application level thing, not an OS-level thing. As far as the OS is concerned, data should be bytes. (Of course, it is true that, since POSIX defines a terminal spec, it has to at least specify how bytes are mapped to characters that print…

Applications have for the most part proven that they cannot be trusted to get text encoding and decoding right, especially not in any consistent way. Operating systems definitely should make it possible to deal with the raw byte streams, but the default and preferred method of text handling should be a standard higher-level interface.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#127

Post by wolf2600 »

wangchow wrote: post #56

I would like to see a built-in natural-language interface so I can, for example, "ps -elf | grep something" with a voice command. In the future we will need these interfaces so if this is built in to the OS that would be nice advantage :)

"need". I don't think you understand what the term really means.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#128

Post by maddyboo »

GrinningFool wrote: post #37
rattray wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr, ~625k source lines of code, mostly C, with a bunch of C++ and Assembly too?

And about 2:1 code to comment ratio in the C side, which seems pretty good to me (without poking at other projects for comparison)

Does it count blank comments? e.g. https://github.com/minoca/os/blob/master/kernel/io/iobase.c#...

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#129

Post by kybernetyk »

steveklabnik wrote: post #116
ams6110 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how slow cloc is. 100x faster than "already very fast" is not going to be a perceptible benefit.

The readme talks about dragonfly BSD's codebase; almost two minutes for cloc, just over one second for loc. That's a noticeable difference.

But how often do you cloc the BSD codebase?

I do clocs maybe once a week. So waiting for 2 minutes isn't really a huge issue here. (Well, it's less than 2 minutes for my code bases).

Smells like premature optimization ;)

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#130

Post by steveklabnik »

kybernetyk wrote: post #129
steveklabnik wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The readme talks about dragonfly BSD's codebase; almost two minutes for cloc, just over one second for loc. That's a noticeable difference.

But how often do you cloc the BSD codebase? I do clocs maybe once a week. So waiting for 2 minutes isn't really a huge issue here. (Well, it's less than 2 minutes for my code bases). Smells like premature optimization ;)

This is totally true as well.
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