Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#11

Post by gigel82 »

detrites wrote: post #2

Absolutely mad history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438 (2019) As a teaser, from the above: > For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating syst…

Well now you made me curious to learn more about this mythical OS and browser... any leads?

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#14

Post by 29athrowaway »

detrites wrote: post #2

Absolutely mad history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438 (2019) As a teaser, from the above: > For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating syst…

Underground but with an Internet website, github and HN account? probably you are hyping it a bit too much.

http://www.biyubi.com/eng_principal.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/nanochess

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nanochess

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#15

Post by brutusborn »

detrites wrote: post #2

Absolutely mad history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438 (2019) As a teaser, from the above: > For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating syst…

Another HN thread on Toledo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337064

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#16

Post by dhosek »

Kind of reminds me of writing single-sector bootloaders¹ for the Apple ][. The idea was that you wouldn’t have DOS on a floppy disk to free up that storage for other stuff, but then if you accidentally turned on your computer with that disk in the drive, you’d want a nice message letting you know you messed up and a prompt so you could put in a DOS disk and boot up properly.

⸻

1. It might have been a whole track on the disk, it’s hard to remember the details of this when it’s 37 years since I last used an Apple ][.

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#17

Post by Solvency »

detrites wrote: post #2

Absolutely mad history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438 (2019) As a teaser, from the above: > For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating syst…

This reads very aggrandizing and hyperbolic.

Re: A monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

#19

Post by kramerger »

Arch-TK wrote: post #6
bmacho wrote: post #4

Why is it monolithic? Why not microkernel? Especially that all the typical jobs of an operating system are outsourced.

I think the infrastructure required for a microkernel would have more features than this OS. It really is incredibly barebones and that's why it is monolithic. That being said, I guess it's maybe possible.

Warning: big piece of opinion that may trigger some of you.

In practice (feel free to verify this yourself by downloading and building the latest L4 derivative), microkernels that actually work on modern hardware need a huge amount of baseline code to get IPC and memory server working in a distributed yet somewhat performant fashion.

There is a flag for compiling Linux without any hardware and filesystem drivers. That gives you the kernel core in a surprising small binary which is not that far from sel4 or okl4.

In summary, monolithic is the new microkernel :)

Post reply on HN