Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KolibriOS 0.7.7

July 2, 2026 by 7 Comments

It’s a fact of life when starting a computer, that booting into whatever operating system you use will take a while. Mine takes somewhere around 30 seconds, and yours probably does too. There has always been the promise of something faster just around the corner, but somehow the OS just keeps getting a little bigger. Perhaps the only computer with a disk based operating system I have ever owned which bucked this trend was a Commodore Amiga, and that machine’s booting speed was achieved by keeping most of its OS in a ROM. The subject of today’s Daily Drivers takes the idea of a long boot time and shreds it, leaving an experience more akin to that Amiga of old. It’s called KolibriOS, it’s small enough to run from a floppy disk if you want it to, it’s lightweight, and fast as lightning. It achieves this feat by being written entirely in assembly language, and it exists as a free fork of the earlier MenuetOS which moved to a proprietary licence in its 64 bit version. I downloaded the ISO file, and gave it a spin.

The KolibriOS GUI with the Netsurf browser showing the KolibriOS wiki.
You can surf the web with NetSurf, but not the encrypted web.

The minimum system requirements for KolibriOS are meagre, 1Mb of disk space, 8Mb of RAM, and a 586-class 32-bit processor. On a 2020s ThinkPad it boots in the proverbial blink of an eye, and drops immediately into a GUI desktop. It has the slightly pixelated look of a 1990s machine, there’s none of the anti-aliasing we’re used to today going on there. Installed software ranges from a set of games, emulators, graphics editors and viewers, internet software including the Webview and Netsurf web browsers, and assembly software development.

The immediate impression is of a mature and useful operating system, without any crashes or blue screens, and with applications that load on a dime. Unfortunately though, despite all the competence I can’t call it a Daily Driver by my definition of being able to write for Hackaday, because the web browser doesn’t support https. Immediately the majority of the modern Internet is off-limits, including this site. This changes the parameters of my review and I can no longer proceed as I normally would, but it doesn’t end it. Something this polished deserves a while to play around. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KolibriOS 0.7.7” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 873: Wait, That’s Not Open Source!

July 1, 2026 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Andy Gryc and Aaron Basset about QNX, and the interesting Open Source history and future of that embedded OS. Why does QNX Everywhere feel more open, and why do you need to register an account to download images? All that and more — Watch to find out!

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 375: Rebuilding Tech On Our Terms And The Hero Nerd

June 26, 2026 by 4 Comments

In this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start off by taking a trip down the Raspberry Pi memory lane and then tackle a fresh pile of listener mail. The discussion moves on to hacking bike counter, homebrew upgrades to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and building RAM from whats in the parts bin. You’ll hear about the latest drop-in upgrade for a classic Casio watch, hosting light bulbs that host subversive literature, and loading Wii U games from a weird disk drive from the 1980s. They’ll wrap things up with a dive into the evolving portrayals of brilliant rebels in media, and all the things you can do with a cheap router.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 872: I’m Not Satoshi

June 24, 2026 by 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Tristan Sherliker about the Craig Wright case, Open Source and the law, and Tristan’s own Open Source project, BunTool. How did Open Source help win the day at the Bitcoin trial? And why is right now such an interesting time to be in the legal field? Watch to find out!

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 374: Flippin’ Phones, Sexy Spraysers, And Frikkin’ Lasers

June 19, 2026 by 3 Comments

Things are back to normal around the Podcast studio, and this week you’ll hear the dulcet tones of Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos.

In Hackaday news, we still have a Frikkin’ Lasers Challenge going on, and now you can even enter your project into it! Join the ranks, won’t you?

Not only do we have a triple mailbag this week, we have another failed attempt at guessing the sound by Kristina. However, [Baron Maximilian von Knuthausen] knew that it was a train, a British one, even. Then it’s on to the hacks, of course, which ought to go far in explaining the show title.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in lovely MP3.

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8087's 4-bit adder block. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

The Adder At The Heart Of Intel’s 8087 FPU

June 16, 2026 by 10 Comments

As simple as the concept of adding two numbers appears at first glance, doing it in the 1970s in Intel’s 8087 FPU with its 69-bit adder was still a tall order. This is namely the core feature that many features like tangents, cosines and exponentiation rely on, so it had to be basically perfect. In a recent die-level analysis of the 8087 [Ken Shirrif] dives into the structure, layout and functioning of this ‘beating heart’ of this piece of semiconductor history.

The Intel 8087 adder and associated registers. (Credit: Intel)
The Intel 8087 adder and associated registers. (Credit: Intel)

Although anyone can build a simple binary adder out of off-the-shelf parts including 74-series logic ICs, the problem is to make it fast so that the 69th bit doesn’t have to wait for e.g. a carry to trickle all the way through the preceding bits. The main way that this is solved is by breaking addition into 4-bit blocks, reducing the problem by a factor of four, along with an optimized Manchester carry-chain carry-lookahead implementation.

The main advantage of this variation of a carry-lookahead is that it reduces the number of required transistors, without sacrificing too much performance. Later on Intel would switch to the faster, but more transistor-intensive Kogge-Stone adder.

Implementing this entire adder with NMOS technology and wiring it all up to the rest of the die required a lot of ingenuity on the side of the Intel engineers, as previously noted this adder is effectively always used in any operation at some stage. This necessitates many surrounding registers and in turn circuitry to manage these, with part of the complexity handled in microcode and part in silicon.