Submitted by Visopsys is a hobby OS for x86-compatible PCs, started in 1997. Version 0.9 was released this morning, and there’s a change log. The summary:
This major release offers a subtly updated look, enhanced networking capabilities and associated programs, Unicode support, a software packaging/download/install/uninstall infrastructure with an online ‘store’, a user space window shell, VMware mouse integration, HTTP, XML, and HTML libraries, some C++ and POSIX threads (pthreads) support, ‘pipes’ for interprocess communication, and additional hashing algorithms.
Visopsys has a long history on OSAlert – the oldest mention being from 2005. It’s been in relatively steady development ever since.
I really miss the days where OS’es were competitive. Now we have Linux omnipresent in everywhere (including Windows!), and there is little need to try anything else. Even low power devices themselves became very powerful to run full fledged operating systems (again Linux distributions), so there is little need to try anything else.
On my Raspberry Pi (which is the slowest device I have), I tried RISC OS, but quickly went back to Raspian (And it looks like the download is no longer listed): https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
On the router I have UniFi (which is Linux, and allows SSHing into the actual hardware). I used to have pfSense based on FreeBSD., though. Speaking of which, there are still BSD bases systems (Mac OS, PlayStation OS, FreeNAS), but even that is becoming rare.
I remember playing with bootloaders, and writing my tiny kernel and drivers. However I do not foresee being able to go down to that level again. The game is unfortunately already lost, and in a way I don’t feel sad about it for some reason…
On the IoT space and secure OSes there are still a couple of interesting ones, like NutrX, Zephyr, mbed, RTOS, GenodeOS, Redox, Arduino bare metal libraries,
Nuttx and ChibiOS, RTEMS and LK, Zephyr and RIOT, …
Ah… Yes I do have some Arduino boards, completely forgotten in a closet.
Thanks for the suggestions though. I think this isolation will probably push me to try out new projects. Or rather the old ones. I was hoping to make a irrigation controller for my plants one day.
sukru,
I rather enjoy working with arduino microcontrollers. It really brings me back to a time when bare metal programming was both feasible and practical!
One area that I strongly prefer linux is for networking. Some protocols like serial over bluetooth, nrf24, etc are pretty easy to do with microcontrollers, but require the addition of a gateway to get online, adding to the complexity and expense of the overall project. If I want something to connect over the network, it’s much easier and even cheaper to get a simple linux board than to hook up components and try to bit bang IP packets on a serial bus to esp8285. Not only that but linux had tools like SSH that make it much easier to get in and diagnose or change things remotely. I haven’t found anything as practical as linux for IOT.
My understanding is that esp8285 chips are reprogramable and might be able to offer more advanced networking development capabilities, but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.
Specialized operating systems are likely to be better for real time work. but for better or worse the linux based pi zeros are so cheap and have so much more power than a microcontroller that linux may well start gaining a footprint in microcontroller projects as well. Linux is deficient for RTOS, but combine a linux SBC with a dedicated microcontroller chip for realtime IO and you have something extremely compelling.
The version numbers are confusing.
April 2018 released version 0.82. Not 0.8.2. It is 0.82.
August 2018 it released 0.83.
May 2019 released 0.84.
Janurary 2020 released 0.85. Again not 0.8.5, it is 0.85.
And now in April 2020 is released 0.9. Not 0.90 or so, it is 0.9.
And 0.9 < 0.82 < 0.83 < 0.84 < 0.85.
That is like I understanding version numbers.
If it is a real numeric number, then
0.9 is the same like 0.90.
And 0.85 < 0.9