The Essence operating system at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]

Post by toast0 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:44 AM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #15

1_player wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two huge hurdles that no hobby operating system can realistically overcome, without major tradeoffs (like being 100% POSIX-compatible): accelerated graphics, which in this day and age are required even for basic 2D rendering, especially if you have a hidpi monitor, and a web browser. Everything else, compared to those two problems, is easy stuff. Graphics is just incredibly complex, opaque and obtuse kernel…

I would place "driver support" as on the same level. Porting a web browser to work on your platform (chromium, webkit) doesn't require rewriting the whole thing, and chromium etc already are designed in a way to isolate browser code from OS-specific code (as we can see by chromium code for windows/linux/macOS/android being mostly shared). On the other hand, making it so your OS works with the large number of common U…

Post by toast0 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

errantspark wrote: post #22

toast0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers are mostly not too hard, you just have to do them. USB seems like a challenge though. If your driver model isn't too wild, you can repurpose drivers from the BSDs and Linux. And maybe even windows networking drivers if ndis works for you. A 1.0 launch really doesn't need to support everything. It just needs to support a large enough handful of common devices. Hell, Apple OSes barely support any hardware.

> Drivers are mostly not too hard Except when they are, which is anytime something is poorly documented, which is pretty much all the time. Let's not even get started on vendors who don't WANT you to write drivers for their hardware. > Hell, Apple OSes barely support any hardware. Would be interesting to see an OS target specifically Apple HW to make it a bit easier on the devs.

Post by skywal_l » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 6:51 AM UTC

1_player wrote: post #10

Hammershaft wrote: post #3

God I would kill to make the pipe dream of competition in the OS space happen, there are many interesting hobbyist projects like this that just peak at some of the features and ideas that the current dominant operating systems don't touch.

There are two huge hurdles that no hobby operating system can realistically overcome, without major tradeoffs (like being 100% POSIX-compatible): accelerated graphics, which in this day and age are required even for basic 2D rendering, especially if you have a hidpi monitor, and a web browser. Everything else, compared to those two problems, is easy stuff. Graphics is just incredibly complex, opaque and obtuse kernel…

Post by DeathArrow » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

1_player wrote: post #10

Hammershaft wrote: post #3

God I would kill to make the pipe dream of competition in the OS space happen, there are many interesting hobbyist projects like this that just peak at some of the features and ideas that the current dominant operating systems don't touch.

There are two huge hurdles that no hobby operating system can realistically overcome, without major tradeoffs (like being 100% POSIX-compatible): accelerated graphics, which in this day and age are required even for basic 2D rendering, especially if you have a hidpi monitor, and a web browser. Everything else, compared to those two problems, is easy stuff. Graphics is just incredibly complex, opaque and obtuse kernel…

Post by lerno » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 10:35 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #24

The GUI is cool and all, but someone could implement that for Linux or BSD. I'm more interested in how the kernel differs from Linux, and what the plan is to increase hardware support (if any).