Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64
I know some interesting non-DOS/UNIX-based open source OS like HelenOS, MenuetOS, or Kolibri. They are X86/X64 only, though.
Are there similar things say for ARM/RISC/etc ?
I know some interesting non-DOS/UNIX-based open source OS like HelenOS, MenuetOS, or Kolibri. They are X86/X64 only, though.
Are there similar things say for ARM/RISC/etc ?
There's RISC OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
It was written for the Acorn computers that were the original use of the ARM architecture. It's still around and is pretty lean, despite being complete with a GUI and network capabilities.
RISC OS Direct has modern webbrowser, Iris:
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
The MIT Lisp machine system: https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/
Mezzano, a much more recent OS written in Common Lisp that runs on Arm rather than special hardware: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
Inferno - https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
Description from Wikipedia: “Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs and now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software under the MIT License. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.”
Plan 9 - one version of which is 9front, which says this:
"Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, MNT Reform, and QEMU. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.
The pi.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 1, 2, and 3. The pi3.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.
QEMU images are provided in QCOW2 format."
https://9front.org/releases/
OP said non-Unix. I'd say that the successor to Unix is Unix-y enough to not qualify for this thread.
It’s not as unix-y as you think.
Go try it
AFAIA plan9 takes the original unix ideas further than Unix or its descendents. in this light, plan9 is more unixy than unix.
In two aspects only
1. Everything is a file. 2. A command does only one thing well
There's no init, fstab, etc etc etc. Very little of your Unix muscle memory will work.
I've used it plenty ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's an odd duck and very interesting but the Unix roots are still clear IMO.
There's Niklaus Wirth's Oberon[0].
0. https://www.projectoberon.net/
RISC-V, ARM in development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
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Explain?
I'm not going to go into it but you can look up most of the information about this dating back 25 years. As someone who was around at the time in that community, and was in certain locations of interest at the time, its best to avoid and use the public projects like AROS etc.
Nonpayment issues, or something else?
<https://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2004-11-00063-DE.html>
I'd appreciate if you could link to something definite rather than play 20 questions over vague insinuations.
There have been a number of passes at embedded Smalltalks. Eg. https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/making-smalltalk-on-a-raspbe...
Back in the day, Tek oscilloscopes ran ST on the metal.
Are we to assume you want it to run on actual hardware? I imagine there are a number of OSes that qualify if emulation is acceptable. One I like:
http://www.vm370.org/
Full S/370 assembler source included.
Indeed. Very alien to Unix users. Also, the idea of virtual machine is totally different from what we currently use in KVM.
Technically you can run Redox-OS on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (ARM), but it still works best on x86_64: https://doc.redox-os.org/book/raspi.html
If you decide you miss DOS, then you can also use the DOS emulator available on Redox-OS. It's not Linux but there are some linux-inspired stuff there, including apps from the Cosmic desktop environment. Both announced here: https://www.redox-os.org/news/release-0.9.0/
"We are not a Linux/BSD clone, or POSIX-compliant..."
and
"It should be able to run most Linux/BSD programs with minimal modifications"
Hmm weird. Will give it a try, anyway.
https://fuchsia.dev/
XINU (Xinu Is not UNIX) OS…good book on it too for Operating System design!
https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/
Exactly like xv6, Xinu is rather unix-ish. Still very very interesting to study.
https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2024/
I've got a hobby OS that's currently x86 32-bit only. amd64 and arm64 are on my roadmap, but if all goes well, it's going to be the same experience on all three platforms, so arm64 won't be anymore exciting than x86 32-bit. Other than, you could run it on a raspberry pi or maybe an arm apple.
I imagine most hobby OSes are looking at arm support vs adding something else, and arm support is going to be more fiddly and have less to show for it. I haven't found much time to work on mine lately, but other things are way more important like getting my virtio-net driver and the v86 virtio-net device to work together; having networking in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=crazierl would be really neat. Running on a pi would be neat too, but a browser demo is way more accessible.
ToaruOS has an ARMv8 port: https://github.com/klange/toaruos and Serenity has an ARM and RISC-V ports: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity ; although I think you would call them Unix-like.
Haiku has tier-2 ports to ARM, RISC-V, and SPARC: https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status
ReactOS has an ARM32 port but the ARM64 one is not usable yet.
Skift apparently runs on ARM and RISC-V: https://skiftos.org/
You could try MorphOS or AROS, which turn your (old) Mac and others into Amigas
I'm surprised that nobody has talked about HaikuOS, I used to daily drive for a while before returning to Linux or OS X, depending on what I do.
>Supported platforms: x86, 32-bit and 64-bit
Because it's not relate to the question.
Edit: Sorry they support other platforms. See next comment.
https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status
Thanks I haven't seen that. I take it all back. Maybe they could add a note on their download page.
https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta5/
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Sculpt yourself some https://genode.org/
I see many OSes here that are missing some lengthy, but apparently not extremely complicated - and quite well defined - parts / components / modules.
I wonder if letting loose a coding LLM on them with clear goals and a feedback loop, could bring them to (at least near) completion?
Probably not helpfully. There isn't much like this to be found in any training data. The required code would be too novel, and I predict an LLM would hallucinate a good 2/3.
Wine improvement could be aided with LLMs by monitoring the output of a windows VM running and see what exactly to display, and what exactly to have in working (not program) RAM.
Same goes for perfect OpenSource Office with MSOffice compatibility: MSOffice is running on Windows is continuously monitored for reference, showing exactly what needs to be outputted. Have this in a feedback and reinforcement loop.
My point is to ask the LLM to implement the well-defined design documents. And tests for verification.
TOPS on old PDP hardware (or an emulator) is quite interesting. If nothing else, it gives an appreciation for the age of many of the ideas that ended up in later OSes like CP/M and MS-DOS.
EUMEL maybe? https://6xq.net/eumel/ (Z80, M68000 and later x86 as well)
RSX-280 for the Z280 CPU:
https://github.com/hperaza/RSX280
Nothing like DOS. Nothing like UNIX.
Project Oberon,
https://www.projectoberon.net
The evolution of Oberon based OSes,
Ethos, https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...
Active Oberon which is the Oberon variant I prefer,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Oberon https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon
Some screenshots at my article, take it while the site still exists,
https://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon§ion=co...
SPIN, done in Modula-3
https://www-spin.cs.washington.edu/external/overview.html
Singularity,
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
https://github.com/lastweek/source-singularity
Midori,
although no source code, the blog posts, existing talks and internal session at Microsof do provide some nice overview,
https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
"The Midori Operating System Overview"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37WgsoZpf3k
"Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET"
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...
"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k
Xerox PARC Mesa, used on the Xerox Star OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
https://computerhistory.org/blog/xerox-alto-source-code/
Xerox PARC Cedar, used on Dorado platforms
http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/cedar/The...
https://worrydream.com/refs/Swineheart_1986_-_A_Structural_V...
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1...
Xerox PARC Smalltalk,
original documentation can be taken from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
- Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice
- Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation
- Smalltalk-80, The Interactive Programming Environment
Squeak and Pharos linage,
https://squeak.org/
https://pharo.org/
Xerox PARC Interlisp-D, with Medley
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1056743.1056745
https://interlisp.org/
House, written in Haskell
https://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/
MirageOS, written in OCaml, partially used by Docker (TCP/IP stack), and Xen Hypervisor
https://mirage.io/
https://mirage.io/blog/2022-04-06.vpnkit
https://xenproject.org/projects/mirage-os/
AmigaOS,
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexamiga.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
https://www.amigaos.net/content/1/features
https://aros.sourceforge.io/
Solo in Concurrent Pascal,
The solo operating system: A concurrent pascal program
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb843ff4581/vb843ff45...
Lillith in Modula-2
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/eth/lilith/ETH7646_Lilith_A_Workst...
https://www.modula2.org/modula2-history.php
Now go out and explore, UNIX is not the be all, end all of how an OS is supposed to be, neither is C the ultimate systems programming language.
HelenOS is multi-platform. Their certificate expired but from their site:
> HelenOS runs on eight different processor architectures
Pretty sure ARM is one of those.
Genode is interesting
see also https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page
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There is an arm version of pretty much every major Linux distribution now. I’ve used mint, debian, and kali all on arm.
Also, see below
https://distroware.gitlab.io/lists/RunsOnARM/
My mistake. Guess what I meant is UNIX and UNIX-like.
Nothing personal against Linux, but I'd like to see something new, like TempleOS, for example.
There is quite a selection in the link I posted… for example FreeBSD/ARM
FreeBSD is a direct descendant of BSD which is UNIX. The BSDs are about as close as you can get to UNIX today.