Writing an Operating System in Ada
in [ADA]
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From: jonathan on 12 Jan 2010 10:14 On Jan 12, 8:36 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...(a)ludovic-brenta.org> wrote: > Have a look athttp://www.lovelace.fr > > This project is dormant at the moment but you can already check it > out. MaRTe OS is another thing worth looking at. I notice that MaRTe OS is alive and well. The latest news from the web site: 19/Aug/2009 New release of MaRTE OS : Adapted to GNAT-GPL-2009 (In other words you have to use the GNAT-GPL-2009 Ada compiler to compile the latest version.) A good starting point might be to boot and explore Marte OS, and then decide which direction interests you. In any case, the source code should be interesting: http://marte.unican.es/ Jonathan
From: Colin Paul Gloster on 12 Jan 2010 11:21 On Mon, 11 Jan 2010, Leslie wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Shark8 wrote: | | | |> I was wondering if there would be any interest in coding up an | |> OS in Ada. I don't mean taking an existing codebase and | |> rewriting/converting it to Ada, but implementing it from the | |> ground up. It's been a bit of a "for later" project for me to | |> write an OS, although I did begin to write one in Turbo Pascal | |> which got to the point of being able to recognize user-commands | |> & (based on those commands) change the screen resolution. {And | |> all using less than ten lines of inline assembly!} | |> | |> As time went on the project went on the back-burner and "later" | |> never really came around, but in that meantime I was finishing | |> up my degree in CS and came across Ada in my senior-level | |> programming languages class. The design of Ada impressed me a | |> lot and so I got myself Barnes's Ada 2005 book and started | |> teaching myself. (So, in reality I'm pretty new to Ada, but I | |> do come from a Pascal background and like the idea of having my | |> compiler check things for correctness.) | |> | |> Anyway, I was wondering if anybody here would be interested in | |> such a project. | | Interestingly, I was just thinking last week while reading John| |Barnes' /Programming in Ada 2005/ that Ada would be a fine | |language to user for writing an OS. I'm not yet proficient in | |Ada, but would be interested in contributing what I can. | | | |Leslie" | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| If the two of you are willing to implement an operating system in Ada then proceed and succeed! I wish you well. However, every few months or years hobbyists' projects for volunteers to develop an operating system in Ada not aimed at embedded targets have been proposed on this newsgroup without ever amounting to anything. Regards, Colin Paul Gloster
From: Shark8 on 12 Jan 2010 11:36 > If the two of you are willing to implement an operating system in Ada > then proceed and succeed! I wish you well. Thank you. > However, every few months > or years hobbyists' projects for volunteers to develop an operating > system in Ada not aimed at embedded targets have been proposed on this > newsgroup without ever amounting to anything. > > Regards, > Colin Paul Gloster I sort of figured that was the case; they probably get intimidated by the sheer amount of work needing to be done for an OS. I'm not saying I won't, but I do kind of expect it considering that I've been inactively designing an OS in my head for years.
From: Colin Paul Gloster on 12 Jan 2010 12:03 On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Shark8 wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------| |"[..] | | | |[..] they probably get intimidated by | |the sheer amount of work needing to be done for an OS. [..]| |[..]" | |-----------------------------------------------------------| In at least one case something worse and not specific to developing an operating system terminated or indefinitely paused one of these projects, but I leave it to the man involved to decide whether or not to post about it to the newsgroup.
From: Shark8 on 12 Jan 2010 12:37
On Jan 12, 2:41 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...(a)dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote: > On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:13:55 -0800 (PST), Shark8 wrote: > > Anyway, I was wondering if anybody here would be interested in such a > > project. > > If that will be a really new OS (not a UNIX clone), OO, portable, > distributed etc, for interesting platforms like this: > > http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/scalable_open_source_computi... > > why not? > > -- > Regards, > Dmitry A. Kazakovhttp://www.dmitry-kazakov.de You know that was a frustrating / discouraging thing to hear almost everybody I talked to about wanting to write an OS say something along the lines of "Why don't you just download the sourcecode for Linux?"... I'm sorry folks, but I don't want to be the OS equivalent of a 'script-kiddie'. One thing I find very annoying about the Unix/Linux mentality is the "everything is a file" philosophy... coupled with the C/C++-ism of simply assuming that a file read/write went well and you're asking for trouble. {Yes, I know that you CAN check to see if writing is successful or not in C/C++, but it goes against most C/C++ programmer's sense of terseness/'beauty'... the same one that makes no check on array-bounds.} </Rant> Now the idea that everything [system-wise] is an object is much more appealing to me. Objects are a very natural way to [generically] model hardware: a display has a running-resolution, available resolutions, OpenGL/DirectX compatibility, etc. It could even be engineered in such a way that every device-object 'knows' how to write code for its device and that code is JIT-compiled for the specific system. (Example: A PCI-card can be inserted unto a system-board with a SPARC processor, or one with an AMD processor, the two different endian-ness but the card is the same for both, so it stands to reason that a device-object [device-driver] could be written in a high-level manner abstracting out the low-level... probably by having the aforementioned JIT which is linked to the CPU's device-object tell that object to output the codes for the PCI-card-object.) Having such a system means that we could support disparate architectures by having base-CPU objects & the high-level driver- objects on a bootable CD with a VM such as DOTNET or JVM and 'installing the OS' would be compiling it for that HW-setup. The downside to how I'm describing it is that it sounds a little too Unix- y. Using the Java-style interfaces we could have a file-system interface which would allow the OS to use any FS which was implemented in an object using said interface. |