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Building OSKit

24 points by nomdep 6y ago

peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"Way back in the late 90’s from the University of Utah there was this fantastic project that promised to bring Operating System construction to mere mortals but taking existing PC operating systems, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and break them down to their best components, and then interlink them using COM allowing you to glue the best parts together like lego. And the project was called OSKit. It was fantastic for something unknown at the time for creating so called ‘bare metal programs’ that didn’t have a real operating system, but rather could use operating features like LIBC, or the EXT2 filesystem." [...] >"I was kind of surprised it never really took off, maybe it was too far ahead of it’s time."
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  From a business perspective, why use this for your startup when you can just throw everything into Chrome browsers by writing JS with Electron? Bare metal isn’t necessary in nearly all cases. To wit, this project didn’t take off.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I guess everyone is too busy redoing CORBA and DCOM with gRPC nowadays, to pick on the COM's reference.
dgacmu 6y ago
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I worked on the OSKit when I was an undergrad at Utah, and it was an incredibly fun project. I think it petered out because the middle ground that it was trying to serve between tiny embedded devices and big computers became capable enough that running a small, full Linux system on them was no longer prohibitive for most of the uses the OSKit targeted. That, and the flux research group started spending a lot more time on Emulab (a project that is still running an incredibly valuable to the networking and systems research communities). Bryan Ford who was the lead author on the OSkit paper, left for a startup around the time it was published, (and is now a professor at EPFL). There's also a bit of a theme of the pendulum swinging back and forth in what systems research is interested in, and the OSKit was released towards the end of the big push in microkernels, but a little bit too early to be relevant for a lot of the manycore research that came in the late 2000s.
- scruffyherder 6y ago
  thanks for the insight! I didn't go emailing people around as it seems that everyone is somewhere else, but I'm just glad the majority of the links are still online. I'm kind of surprised I got it to build 20 years later, but it's been a blast to play with!

24 points by nomdep 6y ago

>"Way back in the late 90’s from the University of Utah there was this fantastic project that promised to bring Operating System construction to mere mortals but taking existing PC operating systems, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and break them down to their best components, and then interlink them using COM allowing you to glue the best parts together like lego. And the project was called OSKit. It was fantastic for something unknown at the time for creating so called ‘bare metal programs’ that didn’t have a real operating system, but rather could use operating features like LIBC, or the EXT2 filesystem." [...] >"I was kind of surprised it never really took off, maybe it was too far ahead of it’s time."

Hydraulix989 6y ago
From a business perspective, why use this for your startup when you can just throw everything into Chrome browsers by writing JS with Electron? Bare metal isn’t necessary in nearly all cases. To wit, this project didn’t take off.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I guess everyone is too busy redoing CORBA and DCOM with gRPC nowadays, to pick on the COM's reference.

dgacmu 6y ago

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I worked on the OSKit when I was an undergrad at Utah, and it was an incredibly fun project. I think it petered out because the middle ground that it was trying to serve between tiny embedded devices and big computers became capable enough that running a small, full Linux system on them was no longer prohibitive for most of the uses the OSKit targeted. That, and the flux research group started spending a lot more time on Emulab (a project that is still running an incredibly valuable to the networking and systems research communities). Bryan Ford who was the lead author on the OSkit paper, left for a startup around the time it was published, (and is now a professor at EPFL). There's also a bit of a theme of the pendulum swinging back and forth in what systems research is interested in, and the OSKit was released towards the end of the big push in microkernels, but a little bit too early to be relevant for a lot of the manycore research that came in the late 2000s.

scruffyherder 6y ago
thanks for the insight! I didn't go emailing people around as it seems that everyone is somewhere else, but I'm just glad the majority of the links are still online. I'm kind of surprised I got it to build 20 years later, but it's been a blast to play with!