CharlotteOS – An Experimental Modern Operating System

Why would you buy it’s more secure. Traditionally in windows in-kernel compositing was a constant source of security vulnerabilities. Sure rust may help the obvious memory corruption possibilities but I’m not convinced.

A monolithic kernel and resource locators that automatically mount network drives? That's just macOS.

(You don't have to recompile the kernel if you put all the device drivers in it, just keep the object files around and relink it.)

Why would you need to recompile if hardware changes? Linux manages just fine as a monolithic kernel that ships with support for many devices in the same kernel build.

Recompile (or at least relink) the kernel to change drivers (or even system configuration) is a bit of a blast from the past - in the 1960s thru 1980s it used to be a very common thing, it was called “system generation”. It was found in mainframe operating systems (e.g. OS/360, OS/VS1, OS/VS2, DOS/360); in CP/M; in Netware 2.x (3.x onwards dropped the need for it)

Most of these systems came with utilities to partially automate the process, some kind of config file to drive it, Netware 2.x even had TUI menuing apps (ELSGEN, NETGEN) to assist in it

Quite common on Linux early days.

Also the only approach for systems where people advocate for static linking everything, yet another reason why dynamic loading became a thing.

If this kernel ever gets big enough where this might matter, I'm sure they can change the design. Nothing is set in stone forever and for the foreseeable future it's unlikely to matter.

Chuck Multiaddr in there (https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/), can be used for URLs, file paths, network addresses, you name it. Easy to parse as well.

To be fair, the submission URL goes to the kernel specifically, so the README is good considering the repository it's in. The link I put earlier I found via the GitHub organization, which does give you an overview of the OS as a whole (not just the kernel): https://github.com/charlotte-os/

Skimming https://doc.redox-os.org/book/scheme-rooted-paths.html and https://doc.redox-os.org/book/schemes.html , I think they've slightly reworked that to a more-unixy approach, but yeah still fundamentally more URI than traditional VFS

But you can see the theme here: Adding more layers of complexity to patch things. LLMs do seem to do a better job than searching forum posts! I would argue that Docker's point is to patch compatibility barriers in Linux.

Indeed. I am reminded of what Alan Kay has repeatedly referred to as a “pop culture” of computing that has become widespread in technical communities since the 1980s, when the spread of technology grew faster than educational efforts. One result is there are many inventions and innovations from the research community that never got adopted by major players. The corollary to “perfect is the enemy of the good” is good-enough solutions have amazingly long lifetimes in the marketplace.

There are many great ideas in operating systems, programming languages, and other systems that have been developed in the fast 30 years, but these ideas need to work with existing infrastructure due to costs, network effects, and other important factors.

What is interesting is how some of these features do get picked up by the mainstream computing ecosystem. Rust is one of the biggest breakthroughs in systems programming in decades, bringing together research in linear types and memory safety in a form that has resonated with a lot of systems programmers who tend to resist typical languages from the PL community. Some ideas from Plan 9, such as 9P, have made their way into contemporary systems. Features that were once the domain of Lisp have made their ways into contemporary programming languages, such as anonymous functions.

I think it would be cool if there were some book or blog that taught “alternate universe computing”: the ideas of research systems during the past few decades that didn’t become dominant but have very important lessons that people working on today’s systems can apply. A lot of what I know about research systems comes from graduate school, working in research environments, and reading sites like Hacker News. It would be cool if this information were more widely disseminated.

There was also a period of time where everyone and their mom was writing a new operating system trying to replicate Linux’ success

Yeah the more you read up on computing history from barely even 40 years ago, it seems that most of the things that we take for granted today became so more through politics (and in the case of Microsoft, bullying) than merit.

In an operating system course I attended it was mostly Unix and everyone was used to bashing Windows NT ("so crappy, bsod etc.") but we had Stallings' book and I was surprised to learn that NT was in many ways an improvement over Unix and Linux.

Ok, even Doug Crockford has mucked around with licensing before, so this is definitely a digression and not aimed at CharlotteOS which looks fascinating:

I wish there was a social stigma in Open Source/Free Software to doing anything other than just picking a bog standard license.

I mean, we have a social stigma even for OS developers about rolling your own crypto primitives. Even though it's the same very general domain, we know from experience that someone who isn't an active, experienced cryptographer would have close to a zero percent chance of getting it right.

If that's true, then it's even less likely that a programmer is going to make legally competent (or even legally relevant) decisions when writing their own open source compatible license, or modifying an existing license.

I guess technically the "clarification" of a bog standard license is outside of my critique. Even so, their clarification is shoe-horned right there in a parenthetical next to the "License" heading, making me itchy... :)

What languages are easy to understand and maintain, anyway?

For sure you'd have to use it from time to time.