Snowdrop OS – a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language
32 comments
·January 24, 2025Tiberium
spogbiper
also TempleOS if you'd prefer something more insane
markus_zhang
I watched a few Terry's streams and TempleOS seems to be something pretty fluid to use. You literally navigate in the console, or whatever it is called, and can open any file the current cursor points to.
meifun
I was coming to the comments to write this reminds me of Terry Davis, may be rest in peace. It might sound strange but Terry provided me with inspiration and a reminder that anything can be created or “Willed into existence”.
ksp-atlas
ZealOS is TempleOS but with support for some modern functionality, however this detracts from the proper TempleOS experience
quanto
In a similar spirit, what are some progresses in performant RTOSes for robotics? There seems to be relatively less interest in that field.
No, ROS/ROS2 is not an operating system and is not what most people call performant software.
theamk
"x86" and "RTOS" don't really work together, given SMM, complex caches, and so on. If you have any sort of high-performance task, you'll likely want to have an separate embedded MCU (or a dozen of them) to control it.
And embedded stuff has a ton of OS'es, such as FreeRTOS, Zephyr, ThreadX... And there are plenty of proprietary solutions, like Nvidia DriveOS.
The embedded OSes are quite limited compared to regular ones like Linux - the task scheduler is present, but everything else (like processes, filesystem, dynamic file loading, binary tools, etc...) is either missing or optional.
bigfishrunning
I think people who are serious about it run QNX or VxWorks. Most robotics projects aren't serious and run Ubuntu unfortunately.
doelie_
Not an RTOS as is commonly understood but RTIC is nice. I think originally developed for robotics.
amelius
What are the latest cool ideas in OS design, both from a user's viewpoint and from an OS hacker's viewpoint?
IshKebab
Fuchsia has a crap load of wild ideas. Microkernel, capabilities, weird app installation system (I think they're trying to make apps more like websites).
https://rtic.rs/ is a pretty cool idea for an embedded RTOS (sort of).
Honestly though there's still stuff in Plan 9 that is way more advanced than what Linux does, e.g. https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html
mycall
Genode [1] has an interesting approach to OS design as it is a framework, but how much is assembly I don't know.
honestSysAdmin
The best answer, given the specific opposite edges you have broadly specified, is
https://redox-os.org/amelius
> Most system components run in user-space on a microkernel system. Because of this, bugs in most system components won’t crash the system/kernel.
It's funny because I want this when I write applications. Each library should run in its own sandbox, and by default they shouldn't be able to touch each other's data.
bboygravity
You're describing Elixir/Erlang?
guerrilla
Something stupid I always wanted to do was to make an object-oriented language where literally every single object was a separate UNIX process. The naive implementation would have horrendous context switching overhead from the IPC, but maybe there's a clever and elegant way to use shared memory...
IshKebab
Redox is Unix-like. It's not going to contain any significantly new ideas.
pjmlp
Kudos, quite an impressive work.
V32, BASIC compiler. :)
Well we can make feature requests, I guess.
notorandit
Looks like menuetos, but 16 bit.
DustinBrett
At least they provide an ISO/IMG. I still wish SerenityOS would do this.
haunter
Serenity has nightly build images https://serenity-builds.halves.dev/
mouse_
But Serenity does not provide them.
hsnewman
This does run on the MiSTer!
vdupras
That's an impressive collection of tools and apps they've built there. And yet, it doesn't seem like they succumbed to the temptation of making it self hosting! I guess the assembler would need some work to bring it to parity with nasm... or bring the whole source code closer to Snowdrop ASM!
Jotalea
Reminds me of TempleOS.
To anyone who's interested in such projects: also check MenuetOS and KolibriOS (which is a fork of Menuet that diverged a looong time ago). MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is closed source.