Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64
51 comments
·March 23, 2025dlcarrier
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.
xet7
RISC OS Direct has modern webbrowser, Iris:
mepian
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
andsoitis
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.”
wormius
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."
rewgs
OP said non-Unix. I'd say that the successor to Unix is Unix-y enough to not qualify for this thread.
snvzz
There's Niklaus Wirth's Oberon[0].
pajko
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
2809
[flagged]
dredmorbius
Explain?
2809
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.
jdougan
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.
lboc
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:
Full S/370 assembler source included.
rbanffy
Indeed. Very alien to Unix users. Also, the idea of virtual machine is totally different from what we currently use in KVM.
evanjrowley
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/
anta40
"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.
slicktux
XINU (Xinu Is not UNIX) OS…good book on it too for Operating System design!
notorandit
Exactly like xv6, Xinu is rather unix-ish. Still very very interesting to study.
toast0
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.
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 ?