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The 4th Year of SerenityOS

serenityos.org

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Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#131

Post by girvo »

squarefoot wrote: post #107
robryan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of people actively pushing ARM support forward.

If ported to ARM it could become quite a thing in embedded development. I'm not thinking about the latest Macs (although... why not?) but rather very small and cheap embedded boards where Linux could be either too resource hungry or overkill. On these small boards a very light GUI oriented OS like SerenityOS and a set of gfx libraries and primitives could be the right tools to make appliance control panels, instrumen…

It would basically be what QNX could've been (and almost was).

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#132

Post by julianeon »

abiloe wrote: post #93
BirAdam wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is similar to the birth of Linux, but with two very major differences. (1) we are in a world where open source is the way . (2) it’s somewhat a reaction to the state of modern software, both in UI paradigm and in increasing cartelization. To me, it’s hope.

> we are in a world where open source is the way. I think you're in a bubble. The world still runs primarily on closed source and proprietary software and services.

We should make a distinction here between legacy and non legacy. For legacy code closed source is dominant.

But we’re seeing a success story for open source on a scale almost never seen before when it comes to AI.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#133

Post by account42 »

saagarjha wrote: post #117
jbirer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern tools are good, but the culture around it is pretty toxic, and in my own opinion, cringy. 10 years ago you would get booed for saying things like "Unused RAM is wasted ram, so let's build this in Electron". I am happy to see a pushback.

“Unused RAM is wasted RAM” is only relevant if you’re writing an OS.

Do any operating systems have an API for cache-only memory that the OS is free to discard at will? Maybe there should be because the other end of the spectrum is unneccessarily loading the same things over and over again even though there is lots of excess memory available. Many games are guilty of this, not really taking advantage of overspecced systems.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#134

Post by origin_path »

yardshop wrote: post #85
stavros wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This project embodies Donald Knuth's principle of being the author of software, rather than just consumers of other's APIs. I feel that this comment unfairly criticizes people who build on other things. This OS runs on hardware, which is someone else's API, and is a hobby project, as far as I can tell. If someone wants to build something cool that uses others' APIs as a hobby project, more power to them.

It's not criticizing anything at all, just suggesting an alternative. We're all always using products that are other people's work, why not ALSO work on something where you author and build your own system?

Seen another way, SerenityOS is almost entirely built on the work of others. Code isn't the hard part in any software project, it's usually the design and architecture that's the hard part (the source of competitive advantage).

The reason Andreas was able to build a community around SerenityOS so fast is the same reason Stallman/Linus were able to do so - everything about it is a direct clone of designs proven out by commercial OS vendors. The core is UNIX (well understood) and the GUI is Windows 2000 (well understood). The code may be fresh, but even there, it is just an ordinary C++ based OS, as conventional as can be. This means working on it is fun for the developers because there are relatively few debates over direction or design, and little risk - you know what you're getting right from the start.

But to claim that such a project is doing it all from scratch zero-rates the design aspect, which seems wrong.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#135

Post by origin_path »

julianeon wrote: post #132
abiloe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are in a world where open source is the way. I think you're in a bubble. The world still runs primarily on closed source and proprietary software and services.

We should make a distinction here between legacy and non legacy. For legacy code closed source is dominant. But we’re seeing a success story for open source on a scale almost never seen before when it comes to AI.

Are we? Most AI models that people know about are proprietary, with some (Google's) so proprietary they won't even provide API access to them.

Yes, Stability AI is doing great stuff with making this tech freely available for now, but it's not clear how sustainable that is in the absence of large VC funds. The players with the bigger more stable budgets are going the proprietary route.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#136

Post by saagarjha »

account42 wrote: post #133
saagarjha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unused RAM is wasted RAM” is only relevant if you’re writing an OS.

Do any operating systems have an API for cache-only memory that the OS is free to discard at will? Maybe there should be because the other end of the spectrum is unneccessarily loading the same things over and over again even though there is lots of excess memory available. Many games are guilty of this, not really taking advantage of overspecced systems.

Most OSes will have this but it's difficult to use as a general API. The main use case is "I freed these pages and will not use them anymore, save on the bookeeping". Anything beyond that is a little dicey because if the OS does reclaim the pages you'll take a fault trying to hit the cache, which can be bad if it happens at an inopportune time. And properly signaling this to applications is hard (SIGSEGV is not a very ergonomic interface).

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#137

Post by Grazester »

miki123211 wrote: post #74

I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, some commercial project adopts a part of Serenity and turns it into a huge hit, even outside of tech. Such things have definitely happened in the past.. Not many (average) people have heard of KDE or its web engine, KHTML, but almost everybody these days uses Chrome, which, through Apple's WebKit, is descended from KHTML itself. Serenity uses its own libraries everywhere, to…

"If Serenity's web engine gets good enough, I can even imagine some EU government sponsoring an independent competitor to the Google / Apple browser duopoly."

...and what is wrong with Mozilla? Why can't they contribute to FireFox?

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#138

Post by spookie »

Grazester wrote: post #137
miki123211 wrote: post #74

I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, some commercial project adopts a part of Serenity and turns it into a huge hit, even outside of tech. Such things have definitely happened in the past.. Not many (average) people have heard of KDE or its web engine, KHTML, but almost everybody these days uses Chrome, which, through Apple's WebKit, is descended from KHTML itself. Serenity uses its own libraries everywhere, to…

"If Serenity's web engine gets good enough, I can even imagine some EU government sponsoring an independent competitor to the Google / Apple browser duopoly." ...and what is wrong with Mozilla? Why can't they contribute to FireFox?

It's sponsored by Google and USA based.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#139

Post by trashburger »

account42 wrote: post #133
saagarjha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unused RAM is wasted RAM” is only relevant if you’re writing an OS.

Do any operating systems have an API for cache-only memory that the OS is free to discard at will? Maybe there should be because the other end of the spectrum is unneccessarily loading the same things over and over again even though there is lots of excess memory available. Many games are guilty of this, not really taking advantage of overspecced systems.

Actually, Serenity has this, called "purgeable memory". You map your memory in a special way, and have to re-map it to use it. If the system needs more memory, it purges those pages, making it possible to use it as a cache :^)

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#140

Post by account42 »

trashburger wrote: post #139
account42 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any operating systems have an API for cache-only memory that the OS is free to discard at will? Maybe there should be because the other end of the spectrum is unneccessarily loading the same things over and over again even though there is lots of excess memory available. Many games are guilty of this, not really taking advantage of overspecced systems.

Actually, Serenity has this, called "purgeable memory". You map your memory in a special way, and have to re-map it to use it. If the system needs more memory, it purges those pages, making it possible to use it as a cache :^)

Neat, found this for a Linux implementation: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/12/29/
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