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Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

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Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#31

Post by Alupis »

rodgerd wrote: post #25
brandonb wrote: post #4

For those not familiar with the Linux kernel contributors, Alan Cox wrote large parts of the networking stack, was the maintainer of the 2.2 branch, and was commonly considered the "second in command" to Linus Torvalds at one point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

And, interestingly enough, a senior maintainer who quit because he got sick of Linus' behaviour.

not being familiar with this case -- but from an outside perspective reading the mailing list now, seems Alan introduced a patch that broke userland code -- which is the biggest No-No in kernel hacking, ie. the number 1 rule is don't break userland. Alan appeared to argue userland code was broken and not his patch, which just made Linus mad (as expected). The kernel strives to never break userland, even when userland is relying on legacy and/or broken pieces of kernel code (the idea is to code around the broken parts and provide compatibility until userland changes/fixes their problem -- ie. no kernel change should ever mass-break userland code).

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#32

Post by pantalaimon »

rodgerd wrote: post #25
brandonb wrote: post #4

For those not familiar with the Linux kernel contributors, Alan Cox wrote large parts of the networking stack, was the maintainer of the 2.2 branch, and was commonly considered the "second in command" to Linus Torvalds at one point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

And, interestingly enough, a senior maintainer who quit because he got sick of Linus' behaviour.

That's not true at all, Alan Cox stated himself

> I'm leaving the Linux world and Intel for a bit for family reasons. I'm aware that "family reasons" is usually management speak for "I think the boss is an asshole" but I'd like to assure everyone that while I frequently think Linus is an asshole (and therefore very good as kernel dictator) I am departing quite genuinely for family reasons and not because I've fallen out with Linus or Intel or anyone else. Far from it I've had great fun working there.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlanCoxLinux/posts/KW3TdRYwjr9

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#33

Post by acjohnson55 »

DanBC wrote: post #27
RexRollman wrote: post #8

When I first read this, I thought this was meant to be a sarcastic statement on SystemD haters, but this is for real? I would assume this is all geared to scratching some kind of retro computing itch?

People used to learn programming by learning assembly language. Here's one example for the 68000: First page of contents: http://imgur.com/1XCLrsQ Example instruction description: http://imgur.com/MV6Le34 Hello world: http://imgur.com/5yKJlQ9 Off topic but if anyone is ever in Cheltenham UK (or is prepared to pay postage) I have some old books I want to get rid of. http://imgur.com/AWV9HLn

For sure! I really got my programming feet wet writing programs in Z80 assembly for my TI-83 graphing calculator as a middle schooler. A few years later I dabbled a bit in 68k when I got a TI-89.

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#34

Post by lambda »

krazemon wrote: post #6

I'm a computer science major in my senior year and I've always been interested in contributing to a big Open Source lowel level software project like this. However, I lack experience working on Operating Systems so have struggled with getting started. Would this be a good place to try getting involved?

Only if you have some existing interest in the hardware in question. This is a hobby retro-computing project, for a chip that was popular 30 years ago.

If you want to get into a low-level, open source project that is relevant today, I would try RISC-V (http://riscv.org/). It's an ISA and family of processor cores designed to be competitive with the niche that ARM usually fills these days, but fully open source, with a freely implemtable ISA. Now, it's pretty new and you can't buy RISC-V chips yet, but it's done by a team led by David Patterson, who is one of the fathers of the RISC architecture, and it looks pretty promising as a new open ISA and family of processor cores.

Or if you want to work on hardware that is actually available today, ARM would probably be your best bet. Maybe try porting Linux, or an RTOS like NuttX (http://www.nuttx.org/), to an ARM SOC that it doesn't yet run on.

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#35

Post by gaius »

femto wrote: post #19
RexRollman wrote: post #8

When I first read this, I thought this was meant to be a sarcastic statement on SystemD haters, but this is for real? I would assume this is all geared to scratching some kind of retro computing itch?

It could also be an exercise in open computing, hailing back to an era before legal attacks and ubiquitous surveillance. Being released in 1976, the Z80 architecture is well known and unencumbered by patents. It's also simple with fixed instruction timing, meaning it can be well tested, leaving few places for a back door to hide. The original hardware probably predates any surveillance programs (edit: and the silicon…

The original ARM was inspired by and designed on the 6502 (in the sense of they visited Western Digital and realized the designing a CPU was actually feasible for a small team, them emulated the design on a BBC Micro with 2nd processor) but IIRC Sophie Wilson stated they have no actual technology in common.

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#36

Post by tracker1 »

Dewie wrote: post #5
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #3

The sardonic introduction and the fact that I initially misread his name as Alan Kay made this all the better for me, but then I came to my senses. Alan Cox is just as interesting of a figure, though, and this is certainly a cool project. One might berate as to why we need another toy Unix, but I personally like having diverse itches scratched. Not to mention this might be an easier introduction to low-level OS hacki…

> Not to mention this might be an easier introduction to low-level OS hacking than having to deal with all the cognitive overhead of contributing to larger projects like Linux and the BSDs Do you have an opinion on Minix, in this respect?

I'd really love to see a micro-kernel with just enough drivers to run on modern hardware, then tied to a higher level platform. I know it may seem really weird, but would love to see node running on something like this. I know there's been some work on getting something like node working with embedded systems via translation, or communication channels, it'd just be nice to see this micro application to something larger, and removing the extra overhead in said system.

Again, just a weird, warped thought here... Hell even getting golang or or rust would be cool. Something you can run some code on without a lot of baggage that you aren't using. I love where coreos is heading, and would love to see something even lighter.

Re: Alan Cox announces Fuzix OS

#40

Post by pjmlp »

DanBC wrote: post #27
RexRollman wrote: post #8

When I first read this, I thought this was meant to be a sarcastic statement on SystemD haters, but this is for real? I would assume this is all geared to scratching some kind of retro computing itch?

People used to learn programming by learning assembly language. Here's one example for the 68000: First page of contents: http://imgur.com/1XCLrsQ Example instruction description: http://imgur.com/MV6Le34 Hello world: http://imgur.com/5yKJlQ9 Off topic but if anyone is ever in Cheltenham UK (or is prepared to pay postage) I have some old books I want to get rid of. http://imgur.com/AWV9HLn

Lattice C! I haven't seen that book in ages.
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