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

Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#21

Post by mixmastamyk »

krustowski wrote: post #20
mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

I would have preferred something like this to the current UEFI environment and shell, a FLOSS 64-bit DOS-like. A cool retro boot manager and diagnostic env perhaps. Could this run from an efi system partition? Seems to support fat12, what about gpt? Does it poke video hardware like DOS, or have a terminal like output?

Booting from an EFI system partition has not been tested yet. FAT12 is the only filesystem (ok, there is a memdisk implementation, but it won't work now) supported, so GPT is not supported at the moment too (yet). Kinda aiming for FAT32 implementation to be the very next implemented (flash disks are usually FAT32 iirc). Not sure about the last question: the OS utilizes/directly writes to the VGA buffer in memory, the…

So MBR partitions? Or no partitions, like from a floppy? Or perhaps it doesn’t know because grub handles that part.

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#22

Post by OhNotAPaper »

Out of curiosity, why x86? Is it the preponderance of resources? The weird instruction format? The complexity of the boot sequence? Are you specifically trying to mimic DOS?

> A support for the ARM architecture (aarch) is coming soon too.

Wow! How do you support a DOS-like OS across multiple architectures when DOS itself is tightly tied to interactions among the program, the system code, and the architecture?

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#23

Post by jmspring »

jdsully wrote: post #13
pvg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa there. Gotta run Doom and BASIC to compete with DOS. That is the officially recognized DOS-Kármán line.

Nobody cares about Lotus 1-2-3 support any longer :)

What about Wordstar?

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#24

Post by rzzzt »

krustowski wrote: post #16
mycall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, can't be a dos with the 'dir' command.

Afaik there is a 'DIR' command in MS-DOS. Anyway, what would be a better command to list a directory? I could think of 'ls' maybe

CATALOG, DSPFLR, Get-ChildItem

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#25

Post by guestbest »

mycall wrote: post #15
pvg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa there. Gotta run Doom and BASIC to compete with DOS. That is the officially recognized DOS-Kármán line.

also, can't be a dos with the 'dir' command.

It would seem to logically follow that a Disk Operating System would have a directory list utility for disks like ‘dir’. It was there in the first version called 86 DOS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#26

Post by mct »

I love that the networking stack uses SLIP and slattach(1)!

I was playing with a toy TCP/IP stack, and decided using SLIP over a pty on Linux was a great way to interface with the kernel. Unfortunately it looks like macOS previously shipped with slattach(1) a very long time ago, but no longer does.

I'm curios if other people have used SLIP on macOS to get a dead-simple, cross-platform API to the networking stack?

The alternative would be to use tun/tap on Linux and utun on macOS, but SLIP would be so much nicer.

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#27

Post by onre »

krustowski wrote: post #16
mycall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, can't be a dos with the 'dir' command.

Afaik there is a 'DIR' command in MS-DOS. Anyway, what would be a better command to list a directory? I could think of 'ls' maybe

I would most likely end up with something like this:

  CAT          CATalogue - output the contents of current directory
  RM           to Raster Memory - load contents of named file in framebuffer
  MV           Make Virtual - map the file into memory and output the address
  LS           Load System - attempt to reboot using the named file as the kernel
  CD           Create Directory - self-explanatory
  SH           System Halt - immediately stop all processing
...and so on.

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#28

Post by AndrewDavis »

guestbest wrote: post #25
mycall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, can't be a dos with the 'dir' command.

It would seem to logically follow that a Disk Operating System would have a directory list utility for disks like ‘dir’. It was there in the first version called 86 DOS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

`dir` was also in CP/M. Though it didn't have a concept of a file hierarchy, so it listed all files on the disk (but did support supplying a pattern to filter against).

Re: Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly

#29

Post by snvzz »

krustowski wrote: post #5
DrNosferatu wrote: post #4

DOS-like but not DOS-compatible, correct?

You are right. The first iteration however is 16bit and is very close to MS-DOS in terms of compatibility. Moreover, any OS that can handle simple disk I/O ops could be considered a DOS system too, innit?

The 16bit one also looks fun[0] and would run on old PCs the new one does not. Have you considered open sourcing that one?

0. https://krusty.space/projects/rourexos/

Post reply on HN