“ significant chunks of it were hand-coded in Arm assembly code” as all modern OS should be at the kernel level
Thank goodness they are not.
Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
91–100 of 205 posts
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you're sandboxing and running all applications in a separate space, is it really correct to refer to it as "users" anymore?
3rd party apps are written (controlled) by other people, and you are effectively granting that 3rd party permission to run their code on your device, so the user concept isn’t that far off the mark. Since ~nobody reads the source code of 3rd party apps, security vetting is usually a matter of deciding to trust the app’s author, same as how you would trust anyone else that you give a user account to.
You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc.
No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…
OS security always requires a concept of a user, unless you want to run all processes under the same identity.
You could do with some other concept than users. E.g. namespaces or capabilities.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The march toward systemd-electron continues.
This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.
> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it
You're describing a system webview, which is a thing on Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#95The most impressive thing to me was the inbuilt BBC Basic, and the availability of every system function to basic with SWI calls.
This contrasts with languages like GW Basic or even commercial QuickBasic (QBX) or Visual Basic: second class citizens when it came to accessing system calls under Windows (or dos).
In fact, I wrote simple basic code to access the undocumented random number generator within the BCM2835 chip - it worked perfectly under RiscOS and even a dedicated BBC Basic emulutor for the Pico.
This is what the code looks like for those that are interested:
REM MAP MEMORY
SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104000,32 TO ,,,RNG_CTRL%
SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104004,32 TO ,,,RNG_STATUS%
SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104008,32 TO ,,,RNG_DATA%
SYS "OS_Memory",13,&2010400C,32 TO ,,,RNG_FF_THRES%
SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104010,32 TO ,,,RNG_INT_MASK%
REM CHECK WHERE THE REGISTERS ARE MAPPED
PRINT “RNG_CTRL MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_CTRL%)
PRINT “RNG_STATUS MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_STATUS%)
PRINT “RNG_DATA MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_DATA%)
PRINT “RNG_FF_THRES MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_FF_THRES%)
PRINT “RNG_INT_MASK MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_INT_MASK%)
REM THESE INTS BECOME REGISTERS R0-R7 RESPECTIVELY
A%=1
B%=RNG_DATA%
C%=RNG_INT_MASK%
D%=RNG_STATUS%
E%=RNG_CTRL%
F%=&1
G%=&4000000
REM GET A RANDOM NUMBER FROM THE RNG
DIM RNG% 30
P% = RNG%
[ OPT 1
SWI “OS_EnterOS”
LDR R0,[R1]
SWI “OS_LeaveOS”
MOV PC,R14
ALIGN
]
REM INIT THE RNG
DIM INIT% 30
P% = INIT%
[ OPT 1
SWI “OS_EnterOS”
STR R5,[R4]
STR R6,[R3]
SWI “OS_LeaveOS”
MOV PC,R14
ALIGN
]
REM LETS INIT…
CALL INIT%
A%=0
X%=0
FIRST%=0
REM KEEP READING RANDOM NUMBERS UNTIL THEY ACTUALLY BECOME RANDOM
REPEAT
X%=A%
A% = USR (RNG%)
PRINT “WARMING UP &”;STR$~(A%)
IF FIRST%REM DISPLAY RANDOM NUMBERS (RETURNED FROM R0)
REPEAT
A%=USR (RNG%)
PRINT “&”;STR$~(A%);" ";
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#96It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…
> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…
Today, the same OS core is used in phones, laptops, desktops and servers. Explicitly making it single-user means giving up on servers and parts of the market for the former three.
You could make the case for removing the concept of users from the kernel and forcing the OS to write some security plugin. The OS could then have a tailored security mechanism for every usecase, but they'd probably end up including users anyway (for the people who do want them).
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer_Reference_Pro...
The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS. In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.
Trivia at this point. But the Oracle Network Computer was a low-end x86 box running FreeBSD and a full-screen Netscape Navigator. Very much a product of its time.
(WebTV, later purchased by Microsoft, was the more successful product in this space.)
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…
Today, the same OS core is used in phones, laptops, desktops and servers. Explicitly making it single-user means giving up on servers and parts of the market for the former three. You could make the case for removing the concept of users from the kernel and forcing the OS to write some security plugin. The OS could then have a tailored security mechanism for every usecase, but they'd probably end up including users a…
One such case is company-issued phones. They require the company-provided apps to be isolated from any user-specific configuration, creating an effective multi-user system where user apps (such as Apple Music) run with different privileges (and network access) than, say, Teams or Outlook.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#99It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…
> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…
Having grown up with RISC OS, I never considered lack of multi user an omission. But the lack of process isolation (or simply: lack of processes) was a real head-ache.
No memory protection or hardware access, rudimentary virtual memory "page mapping". Any tardy calls to Wimp_Poll() freezing the entire GUI. "Cooperative multitasking" also means it's still impossible to do something useful with more than 1 Raspberry Pi core.
So: lacking in foundations, yes. But multi user, not so much.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#100RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi and other small boards.
Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?