The Temple Operating System • Hacker News Board

Re: The Temple Operating System

#31

Post by archgoon » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 9:50 PM UTC

A nice cogent summary of the goals of the project:

"The main reason TempleOS is simple and beautiful is because it's ring-0-only and identity-mapped. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. That's the vision for Linux. That's why it has file permissions. The vision for TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a home computer mostly used for games. It trained my generation how to program. It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. The games were not multimedia works of art, but generated programmatically with innocent, programmer (non-artist) quality graphics. It was simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't have bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated."

Re: The Temple Operating System

#32

Post by ekr » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 9:54 PM UTC

anonymousDan wrote: post #18

I don't quite understand what he meant by 'identity-mapped' - can anyone clue me in?

I haven't looked through it, but it probably means that you can access individual physical bytes in memory by using their physical address (there's a one to one correspondence between the physical address and the logical address of a byte).

I'm not exactly sure how that is achieved, as far as I know, in order to switch to long mode, you need to have enabled paging.

I've been myself looking to start my own OS (protected mode), but it will probably be a unix code. What this guy has done obviously deserves a lot of admiration.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#33

Post by eli » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 9:56 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #21

meowface wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has some mental issues of some kind. He is a great programmer, though, and his work shouldn't be discounted just because he's a bit off.

A bit off, that's like saying Stalin had the odd off day or Machiavelli was a tad manipulative. LoseThos is balls to the wall flat out crazy.

That's not very nice.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#34

Post by munin » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #25

noir_lord wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off, that's like saying Stalin had the odd off day or Machiavelli was a tad manipulative. LoseThos is balls to the wall flat out crazy.

It's interesting that he's done more actual work than most of us. I would imagine he spends most of his time working on the OS rather than interacting with people. Kind of puts into perspective how productive we could be... And also how useless some forms of productivity are.

has he? making a booting from metal OS is a semester long undergraduate project, and this person has been working on it for way longer than that. in a semester, university programs expect you to write a kernel that boots to a shell with virtual memory management and multi-tasking. templeos doesn't even have virtual memory management.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#35

Post by koala_advert » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

More info and examples of the developers schizophrenic chatter here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...

Re: The Temple Operating System

#36

Post by sillysaurus2 » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

munin wrote: post #34

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that he's done more actual work than most of us. I would imagine he spends most of his time working on the OS rather than interacting with people. Kind of puts into perspective how productive we could be... And also how useless some forms of productivity are.

has he? making a booting from metal OS is a semester long undergraduate project, and this person has been working on it for way longer than that. in a semester, university programs expect you to write a kernel that boots to a shell with virtual memory management and multi-tasking. templeos doesn't even have virtual memory management.

Most universities let most programmers avoid doing all of that by themselves, which is probably the most impressive part of this project.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#37

Post by cromwellian » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

Anyone trying to bring back the spirit of the Commodore 64 gets a +1 from me, even if they are batshit crazy. In fact, you have to be crazy to do a project like this.

Here's to the crazy ones.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#38

Post by X-Istence » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:04 PM UTC

eck wrote: post #20

I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness. But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot... It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you hav…

The entire OS is written in a language called C+ (now renamed to Holy C), it is an very interesting language in that it is just in time compiled. It's a mix between old school C and C++, taking some good/bad from both.

The language is fully documented too, see http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html.

The entire OS runs in a single memory space, so processes communicating with each other is as simple as writing to that processes memory space and telling to go execute.

All of the .z files you find in the source tree directories are a gzip like algorithm that on the fly in the OS automatically unzips them, and then compiles the code contained within.

The interesting thing is that while the programs are generally just in time compiled, the main startup programs can't be, however you can easily change the OS and re-run the compiler, overwrite the already started OS and continue on. The compiler CAN write binaries but it is not recommended by the author.

And I may have spent entirely too much time in this ;-).

The author may be a schizophrenic, what he has built is kinda neat.

Re: The Temple Operating System

#39

Post by X-Istence » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:06 PM UTC

munin wrote: post #34

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that he's done more actual work than most of us. I would imagine he spends most of his time working on the OS rather than interacting with people. Kind of puts into perspective how productive we could be... And also how useless some forms of productivity are.

has he? making a booting from metal OS is a semester long undergraduate project, and this person has been working on it for way longer than that. in a semester, university programs expect you to write a kernel that boots to a shell with virtual memory management and multi-tasking. templeos doesn't even have virtual memory management.

He doesn't want virtual memory management... the guy wrote his own just in time compiler that compiles and runs programs on the fly...

Re: The Temple Operating System

#40

Post by rsync » Sat, Aug 31, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

dylz wrote: post #27

So I will just leave this here: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/DateTime.html

I love this.

First of all, a single day being equal to 32 bits - that's a nice touch right there.

Second, given the way most of the world reckons time (it is the year 2013, after all) seconds since Christ makes a lot more sense than seconds since 1970 ...