Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

Post by slater » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

markstos wrote: post #30

the_biot wrote: post #25

This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon. Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this. Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy…

Spectrum OS, meant be a more usable upgrade from Qubes. Based on NixOS. Currently stuck on plumbing problems. https://spectrum-os.org/ Bheem OS, "a next generation secure operating system." Inspired some by Spectrum. So new they can't keep their blog online. Here's a snapshot of a recent blog post about the security features https://blog.openw3b.org/crosvm-for-os-and-app-virtualizatio...

Post by walrus01 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

beardog wrote: post #39

walrus01 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main problem I ran into with qubes is that having a xen hypervisor and an nvidia desktop graphics card in use (with proprietary nvidia drivers in use for proper performance) seem to be mutually exclusive. a xen dom0 needs to use the host system RAM in some way that causes kernel panics and crashes when the nvidia DKMS driver is loaded. I would wager that 99% of xen related development is intended, as it should be…

The reason isn't so much that xen doesn't support it but more so that graphics cards are not very well intended for isolation. Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think you're supposed to compute 1 thing on a gpu and expect another thing to not get access. In recent time Qubes has made progress on making a GPU VM where you can compute on a secondary GPU, but it only works for amd currently. I use nvidia every day wit…

Post by licnep » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

Post by Ygg2 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:47 AM UTC

chungy wrote: post #15

Gives me very strong BeOS vibes.

Post by NavinF » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:54 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #40

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

So first off: Very cool. Amazingly polished, and self-hosting! Especially since it looks to be an actually-independent project with POSIX as an optional compat layer. I feel like the features that are unique are mostly in 3 groups: 1. Features that shouldn't be unique to this system. Tabbed windows have occasionally happened on other systems, and probably should become more common, and there's no reason it shouldn't…

> Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive To me the real obstacle isn't that it's expensive (I mean, you could ostensibly cache the size on disk for each directory, if not find some other clever algorithmic solution), but that the notion of "size of a directory" itself isn't all that meaningful in the presence of e.g. hardlinks.