Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#2 "UPDATE: Thanks to the Lobsters commmunity, commenting on my Lobsters post, I have come to the conclusion Nanix is unfeasable. That's too bad! "
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#3This has already been done. Works fine on older hardware: http://www.toms.net/rb/
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#4This has already been done. Works fine on older hardware: http://www.toms.net/rb/
Similar for FreeBSD: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#5[deleted]
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#6A possible alternative: pester Blackberry with requests for opening the 32bit variant of QNX (crowfunding?), since they're likely moving to 64bit anyway. Very small devices with RAM sizes well below the Gigabyte are the ones which would benefit the most from it.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#7This has already been done. Works fine on older hardware: http://www.toms.net/rb/
Similar for FreeBSD: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html
I think there are many niche BSD derivatives that focus on minimal footprint and small machines.
The other day I was looking at RetroBSD for example.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#8A possible alternative: pester Blackberry with requests for opening the 32bit variant of QNX (crowfunding?), since they're likely moving to 64bit anyway. Very small devices with RAM sizes well below the Gigabyte are the ones which would benefit the most from it.
Surely they are still selling the 32 bit version to the embedded market?
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#9I'm always in favor of homebuilt OS projects, I've worked on several in-house OSs and they seem to have good ideas salted around them.
If it were me, I'd write an open source RTOS (yet another one) and cast around for clever notions to stick in the thing, for the mental exercise if nothing else. Perhaps carve out a niche in quality/safety and not so much in performance.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#10"UPDATE: Thanks to the Lobsters commmunity, commenting on my Lobsters post, I have come to the conclusion Nanix is unfeasable. That's too bad! " That thread is here: https://lobste.rs/s/qurwmz
This seems sarcastic to me.
You'll compile a lot out, sure, but I don't understand from the discussion why it can't be done. I understand why it's hard, why certain people have no interest in it, and why using a 64-bit address space is important for security defense. But nome of that seems to make it fundamentally impossible.