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" The original MIX computer ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself. But nowada

" The original MIX computer ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself. But nowadays such power is no longer in the hands of ordinary users. The MMIX hardware, like all other computing machines made today, relies on an operating system to get jobs started in their own address spaces and to provide I/O capabilities. Whenever anybody has asked if I will be writing a book about operating systems, my reply has always been ``Nix.'' Therefore the name of MMIX's operating system, NNIX, should come as no surprise. From time to time I will necessarily have to refer to things that NNIX does for its users, but I have no intention of building NNIX myself. Life is too short. It would be wonderful if some expert in operating system design became inspired to write a book that explains exactly how to construct a nice, clean NNIX kernel for an MMIX chip. The MMIX fascicle includes a level-50 exercise that asks a highly motivated reader to ``Write a book about operating systems, which includes a complete design of an NNIX kernel for the MMIX architecture.'' Other alternatives are also possible; for example, somebody at the Free Software Foundation might decide to come up with an alternative system called GNNIX. "

masklinn 9y ago
> " The original MIX computer ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself. But nowadays such power is no longer in the hands of ordinary users. The MMIX hardware, like all other computing machines made today, relies on an operating system to get jobs started in their own address spaces and to provide I/O capabilities. Unikernels come back to that, to an extent, what there is of the OS is part of the application, and IO capabilities are provided by libraries linked into the unikernel application. As always, the issue is having IO drivers for the hardware in a form which can be used.

masklinn 9y ago

> " The original MIX computer ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself. But nowadays such power is no longer in the hands of ordinary users. The MMIX hardware, like all other computing machines made today, relies on an operating system to get jobs started in their own address spaces and to provide I/O capabilities. Unikernels come back to that, to an extent, what there is of the OS is part of the application, and IO capabilities are provided by libraries linked into the unikernel application. As always, the issue is having IO drivers for the hardware in a form which can be used.