Point in case: Ben Eater recently uploaded a video where his “BIOS” consists of two I/O functions and compiles into less than 250 bytes. Double that if you count his port of WOZMON. We can argue later if that constitutes an operating system - I mean, it’s not POSIX compliant but it does operate.
Splitting individual atoms isn’t that difficult, you just need a neutron supply and some material (paraffin wax works) to slow them down and it will eventually happen at least with uranium. Doing it reliably and efficiently is a much harder problem.
I have heard about Redox. What’s the difference between a microkernel and a kernel? Does redox use the linux kernel? Or has the guy written that in rust too?
Well, think microkernels as the bare minimum. They give you just enough to write your own OS on top of that: only the bare essentials run in kernel space, whilst everything else runs in user space and has to communicate with the kernel. Compare this to a monolithic kernel, like the Linux kernel: here, the whole operating system is run in kernel space, which means that data doesn’t need to be moved between user and kernel space: this makes the OS faster, but at the cost of modularity. Redox doesn’t use the Linux kernel, it uses its own microkernel written in Rust.
Edit: A good example would be driver. In a microkernel, these run separately from the kernel and interact with it when needed. In a monolithic kernel, these drivers would be included in the kernel itself. They both have their pros and cons: if you’re interested, feel free to look it up.
No problem! Actually, System76 is currently working on rewriting the COSMIC desktop in Rust (or really, just writing a new DE in Rust). It’s a pretty ambitious project that should hopefully get released some time this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lead redox dev was working on it too: low-level Rust knowledge is exactly what they need.
So I watched a few guides and did all that... what now? Would you think a shopping list app is doable for my knowledge after this? It looks really hard compared to NorgurOS... :(
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