operating system

41 Articles

Tactility; The ESP32 Gets Another OS

January 11, 2025 by 11 Comments

Doing the rounds this week is a new operating system for ESP32 microcontrollers, it’s called Tactility, and it comes from [Ken Van Hoeylandt]. It provides a basic operating system level with the ability to run apps from an SD card, and it has the choice of a headless version or an LVGL-based touch UI.

Supported devices so far are some Lillygo and M5Stack boards, with intriguingly, support in the works for the Cheap Yellow Display board that’s caught some attention recently. The term “ESP32” is now a wide one encompassing Tensilica and RISC-V cores and a range of capabilities, so time will tell how flexible it is for all branches of the family.

We find this OS to be interesting, both in its own right and because it joins at least two others trying to do the same thing. There’s [Sprite_TM]’s PocketSprite mini console, and the operating system used by the series of Netherlands hacker camp badges,  We’ll be trying to get a device running it, in order to give you a look at whether it’s suitable for your projects. If it runs well on the cheaper hardware, it could be a winner!

Writing A RISC-V OS From Scratch

January 9, 2025 by 15 Comments

If you read Japanese, you might have seen the book “Design and Implementation of Microkernels” by [Seiya Nuda]. An appendix covers how to write your own operating system for RISC-V in about 1,000 lines of code. Don’t speak Japanese? An English version is available free on the Web and on GitHub.

The author points out that the original Linux kernel wasn’t much bigger (about 8,500 lines). The OS allows for paging, multitasking, a file system, and exception handling. It doesn’t implement interrupt handling, timers, inter-process communication, or handling of multiple processors. But that leaves you with something to do!

The online book covers everything from booting using OpenSBI to building a command line shell. Honestly, we’d have been happier with some interrupt scheme and any sort of crude way to communicate and synchronize across processes, but the 1,000 line limit is draconian.

Since the project uses QEMU as an emulation layer, you don’t even need any special hardware to get started. Truthfully, you probably won’t want to use this for a production project, but for getting a detailed understanding of operating systems or RISC-V programming, it is well worth a look.

If you want something more production-ready, you have choices. Or, stop using an OS at all.

Haiku OS’s Beta 5 Release Brings Us Into A New BeOS Era

October 30, 2024 by 27 Comments

The name BeOS is one which tends to evoke either sighs of nostalgia or blank stares, mostly determined by one’s knowledge of the 1990s operating system scene. Originally released in 1995 by Be Inc., it was featured primarily on the company’s PowerPC-based BeBox computers, as well as being pitched to potential customers including Apple, who was looking for a replacement for MacOS. By then running on both PowerPC and x86-based systems, BeOS remained one of those niche operating systems which even the free Personal Edition (PE) of BeOS Release 5 from 1998 could not change.

As one of the many who downloaded BeOS R5 PE and installed it on a Windows system to have a poke at it, I found it to be a visually charming and quite functional OS, but saw no urgent need to use it instead of Windows 98 SE or 2000. This would appear to have been the general response from the public, as no BeOS revival ensued. Yet even as BeOS floundered and Be Inc. got bought up, sold off and dissected for its parts, a group of fans who wanted to see BeOS live on decided to make their own version. First called OpenBeOS and now Haiku, it’s a fascinating look at a multimedia-centric desktop OS that feels both very 1990s, but also very modern.

With the recent release of the R1 Beta 5 much has been improved, which raises the interesting question of how close Haiku is to becoming a serious desktop OS contender.

Continue reading “Haiku OS’s Beta 5 Release Brings Us Into A New BeOS Era” →

FreeBSD At 30: The History And Future Of The Most Popular BSD-Based OS

October 28, 2024 by 40 Comments

Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and open source Unix operating system (386BSD) it continues the legacy that the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) began in 1978 until its final release in 1995. The related NetBSD project saw its beginnings somewhat later after this as well, also forking from 386BSD. NetBSD saw its first release a few months before FreeBSD’s initial release, but has always followed a different path towards maximum portability unlike the more generic nature of FreeBSD which – per the FAQ – seeks to specialize on a limited number of platforms, while providing the widest range of features on these platforms.

This means that FreeBSD is equally suitable for servers and workstations as for desktops and embedded applications, but each platform gets its own support tier level, with the upcoming version 15.x release only providing first tier support for x86_64 and AArch64 (ARMv8). That said, if you happen to be a billion-dollar company like Sony, you are more than welcome to provide your own FreeBSD support. Sony’s Playstation 3, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 game consoles namely all run FreeBSD, along with a range of popular networking and NAS platforms from other big names. Clearly, it’s hard to argue with FreeBSD’s popularity.

Despite this, you rarely hear people mention that they are running FreeBSD, unlike Linux, so one might wonder whether there is anything keeping FreeBSD from stretching its digital legs on people’s daily driver desktop systems?

Continue reading “FreeBSD At 30: The History And Future Of The Most Popular BSD-Based OS” →

Linux, Now In Real Time

September 21, 2024 by 27 Comments

Although Linux runs almost every supercomputer, most of the web, the majority of smart phones, and a few writers’ ancient Macbooks, there’s one major weak point in the Linux world that will almost always have developers reaching for a different operating system. Linux is not a real-time operating system (RTOS), meaning that it can’t respond to requests in the real world within a set timeframe. This means that applications needing computer control in industry, medicine, robotics, and other real-world situations generally need a purpose-built RTOS. At least, that was true until recently when an update to the Linux kernel added real-time capabilities.

The feature, called PREEMPT_RT, forces the Linux kernel to respond to certain request within a set limit of time. This means that a system with this support built into the kernel can “preempt” any current task, stopping everything else a computer is doing in order to execute that task right away. There are some existing solutions to getting a functional equivalent system working with Linux now, but they can be clunky or inelegant, requiring the user to install patches or other software to get it to work. With the support built directly into the kernel this will become much less of a pain point for anyone who needs this functionality going forward.

This feature has been in the works for around two decades now, so with this entering general use now we would expect to start seeing it show up in various projects as well as in commercial offerings soon, especially since other RTOS solutions can be pricey. Don’t recompile the kernel in your desktop for this feature just yet, though; real-time function can cause some unintended consequences with normal use you’ll need to account for. There’s some more discussion on this in the /r/Linux subreddit and there are some other real-time operating systems available for computers not typically capable of running Linux to take a look at as well.

Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive In 2024

January 15, 2024 by 24 Comments

Haiku is one of those open source operating systems that seem to be both exceedingly well-known while flying completely under the radar. Part of this is probably due to it being an open source version and continuation of the Be Operating System (BeOS). Despite its strong feature set in the 1990s, BeOS never got much love in the wider computer market. Nevertheless, it has a strong community that after twenty-two years of development has now reached a point where you can daily drive it, according to the [Action Retro] channel on YouTube.

One point where Haiku definitely scores points is with the super-fast installation and boot. [Action Retro] demonstrates this on real hardware, and we can confirm that it boots very fast in VirtualBox on a low-end Intel N100-based host system as well. With the recently introduced QtWebEngine-based Falkon browser (formerly known as QupZilla) even JavaScript-heavy sites like YouTube and retro Mac emulators work well. You can even get a Minecraft client for Haiku.

Although [Action Retro] notes that 3D acceleration is still a work-in-progress for Haiku, his 2014-era AMD system smoothly played back 1080p YouTube videos. Although not addressed in the video, Haiku is relatively easy to port existing software to, as it is POSIX-compatible. There is a relatively modern GCC 11.2 compiler in the Beta 4 release from 2022, backed up by solid API documentation. Who doesn’t want to take a poke at a modern take on the OS that nearly became MacOS?

Continue reading “Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive In 2024” →

Apple System 7… On Solaris?

November 8, 2023 by 17 Comments

While the Unix operating systems Solaris and HP-UX are still in active development, they’re not particularly popular anymore and are mostly relegated to some enterprise and data center environments They did enjoy a peak of popularity in the 90s during the “wild west” era of windowed operating systems, though. This was a time when there were more than two mass-market operating systems commercially available, with many companies fighting for market share. This led to a number of efforts to get software written for one operating system to run on others, whether that was simply porting software directly or using some compatibility layer. Surprisingly enough it was possible in this era to run an entire instance of Mac System 7 within either of these two Unix operating systems, and this was an officially supported piece of Apple software.

The software was called the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), and was an effort by Apple to bring Macintosh System 7 applications to various Unix-based operating systems, including Solaris and HP-UX. This was a time before Apple’s OS was Unix-compliant, and MAE provided a compatibility layer that translated Macintosh system calls and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the equivalent Unix calls, allowing Mac software to function within the Unix environments. [Lunduke] outlines a lot of the features of this in his post, including some of the details the “scaffolding” allowing the 68k processor to be emulated efficiently on the hardware of the time, the contents of the user manual, and even the memory management and layout.

What’s really jarring to anyone only familiar with Apple’s modern “walled garden” approach is that this is an Apple-supported compatibility layer for another system. At the time, though, they weren’t the technology giant they are today and had to play by a different set of rules to stay viable. Quite the opposite, in fact: they almost went out of business in the mid-90s, so having their software run on as many machines as possible would have been a perk at the time. While this era did have major issues with cross-platform compatibility, there was some software that attempted to solve these problems that are still in active development today.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!