10 ms·
Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly
To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU.
https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition
- rollcat 1y agoMemory-safe language. x86_64, with Arm on the roadmap. Networking stack. Boots from a CD and via multiboot. Your hobby project wipes the floor with DOS.
- pvg 1y agoWhoa there. Gotta run Doom and BASIC to compete with DOS. That is the officially recognized DOS-Kármán line.
- krustowski 1y agoWhat a challenge! Need to implement some interrupts it seems then, to provide an API for filesystem and so... Thank you for such idea
- rollcat 1y agoDOOM required DOS 5.0. rou2exOS is only the second take. Watch this area ;)
- jdsully 1y agoNobody cares about Lotus 1-2-3 support any longer :)
- jmspring 1y agoWhat about Wordstar?
- hans_castorp 1y agoWordPerfect was better anyway :) (SCNR)
- RoyTyrell 1y agoThe text editor JOE has a WordStar mode.
- mycall 1y agoalso, can't be a dos with the 'dir' command.
- krustowski 1y agoAfaik there is a 'DIR' command in MS-DOS. Anyway, what would be a better command to list a directory? I could think of 'ls' maybe
- rzzzt 1y agoCATALOG, DSPFLR, Get-ChildItem
- onre 1y agoI would most likely end up with something like this: CAT CATalogue - output the contents of current directory RM to Raster Memory - load contents of named file in framebuffer MV Make Virtual - map the file into memory and output the address LS Load System - attempt to reboot using the named file as the kernel CD Create Directory - self-explanatory SH System Halt - immediately stop all processing ...and so on.
- anyfoo 1y agoVery good design. Implements only the essential tasks an operator would need with concise and well-known mnemonics. I’m sure this will be immediately intuitive to anyone, with no potential for mistakes whatsoever.
- OccamsMirror 1y agoI suggest: RM Relocate me - you could also use the "-rf" flag to relative fuzzy matching, for instance `rm -rf tmp` to find any temp-like folder near your current location. Pretty standard stuff. CD Clear data - `cd -L /temp` would "liquidate" the directory. This would be a much simpler command interface.
- koziserek 1y ago
- pjmlp 1y agoBorland languages and xBase ecosystem as well
- MoonGhost 1y ago> Rust and x86 assembly then > Memory-safe language. What's the point? Looks like today Rust is like 3D printing was. As if it makes something better. Printing was hyped and advertised by printers sellers and manufacturers. Finally they run out of money. As for project, it's cool if compatible with old soft. Otherwise suitable mostly for education and masochism. Long way to become practical anyway even if it gets traction.
- unchar1 1y agoYou can write memory safe code in any language, but having a machine i.e. the Rust compiler check it for you is less error-prone than if a human does it. Also if you look at the repo, only 3% of the codebase is in Assembly. IMO if >95% project is in Rust, you can definitely claim it's a Rust project.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoFinally, a positive comment about Rust that I can 100% agree with :)
- whytevuhuni 1y agoThe idea of Rust is not that it is 100% safe, but rather that it is able to encapsulate unsafety and divide the program in two parts: - unsafe code plus modules that support it (the "trusted base") - all the rest Rust's promise is that there is no way to trigger any undefined behavior from bugs happening in "all the rest" of the code. If that code makes for more than 95% of the total, then that's a huge win compared to a completely unsafe language. Also, Rust's support for inline assembly is in my opinion better than C's, it's much easier to specify and figure out the constraints on the boundary between Rust/assembly.
- krustowski 1y agoWell, the point is to experiment with Rust no_std+no_main environment while trying to educate myself on how the things work under the hood. The project itself is part "just" a rewritten system (from C to Rust), and part an enhancement of such system furthermore. It lacks the external program execution though yet.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoDOS-like but not DOS-compatible, correct?
- krustowski 1y agoYou are right. The first iteration however is 16bit and is very close to MS-DOS in terms of compatibility. Moreover, any OS that can handle simple disk I/O ops could be considered a DOS system too, innit?
- leeter 1y agoCorrect, there is a difference between MS-DOS and IBM-PC compatible and a DOS (ex: all the DOSes that existed for Amiga/Apple II/Commodore etc). There are many DOSes (and even MSDOSes, because yay early PC era incompatibilities!), but there is a very dubious list of things needed to be MS-DOS and IBM-PC compatible. You can probably do it if you're willing to setup a hypervisor and emulate some hardware. NGL one of my long term projects was/is something exactly like this but UEFI and secure boot. The idea being to use the VM extensions to create IBM-PC and DOS compatible environments. For anything using DPMI[1] I'd probably do the same trick as Win95 did and just replace it with my own implementation so it's not too overburdened with layers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Protected_Mode_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Protected_Mode_Interface
- JdeBP 1y agoA version of (say) FreeDOS that was layered on top of the EFI API instead of PC98 firmware interrupts would be quite interesting. That would be a major architectural change to most of the programs, of course. But one would have provided the EFI Shell with essentially a complete suite of MS-DOS (albeit not PC-DOS or DR-DOS) commands. That could probably be quite easily ported to (say) ARM whereas the original still has x86isms. On the other hand, did you see https://github.com/FlyGoat/csmwrap https://github.com/FlyGoat/csmwrap when it came up a few weeks ago? * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101828 There are already projects to provide replacements for the vanished Compatibility Support Module.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoI would have preferred something like this to the current UEFI environment and shell, a FLOSS 64-bit DOS-like. A cool retro boot manager and diagnostic env perhaps. Could this run from an efi system partition? Seems to support fat12, what about gpt? Does it poke video hardware like DOS, or have a terminal like output?
- krustowski 1y agoBooting from an EFI system partition has not been tested yet. FAT12 is the only filesystem (ok, there is a memdisk implementation, but it won't work now) supported, so GPT is not supported at the moment too (yet). Kinda aiming for FAT32 implementation to be the very next implemented (flash disks are usually FAT32 iirc). Not sure about the last question: the OS utilizes/directly writes to the VGA buffer in memory, the provided resolution is 80x25 by GRUB.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoSo MBR partitions? Or no partitions, like from a floppy? Or perhaps it doesn’t know because grub handles that part.
- krustowski 1y agoFor FAT12, it reads the first sector (0 or bootsector) of the floppy provided to gather information like bytes per sector, reserved sectors count, LBA of the root directory, etc.
- OhNotAPaper 1y agoOut of curiosity, why x86? Is it the preponderance of resources? The weird instruction format? The complexity of the boot sequence? Are you specifically trying to mimic DOS? > A support for the ARM architecture (aarch) is coming soon too. Wow! How do you support a DOS-like OS across multiple architectures when DOS itself is tightly tied to interactions among the program, the system code, and the architecture?
- anyfoo 1y agoI have not looked at this project, but my guess would be: x86 is a widely available platform that, because of its history and relentless compatibility, contains a lot of legacy interfaces that make implement a very simple, thin-layer and “DOS-like OS” without the need to parse device trees, set up MMUs, deal with complex busses like PCI(e) and so on. It is much harder to bootstrap a simple OS in ARM, and it won’t stay very simple unless you accept significantly more limitations than you would under x86. (For example, you can’t do very much with the MMU off on ARM, and you also don’t have convenient BIOS interfaces that allow you to, say, read a sector, or wait for a keypress, with just a few lines of assembly).
- krustowski 1y agoThe x86 arch is used because this system iteration derives from the first one, which relies on BIOS interrupts and inline assembly in Turbo C. I am not trying to mimic (MS-)DOS exclusively, but both systems are highly inspired by it. IMO multiple archs could be supported as Rust compiler allows the target arch specification, so one would build a specific target before the build itself.
- mct 1y agoI love that the networking stack uses SLIP and slattach(1)! I was playing with a toy TCP/IP stack, and decided using SLIP over a pty on Linux was a great way to interface with the kernel. Unfortunately it looks like macOS previously shipped with slattach(1) a very long time ago, but no longer does. I'm curios if other people have used SLIP on macOS to get a dead-simple, cross-platform API to the networking stack? The alternative would be to use tun/tap on Linux and utun on macOS, but SLIP would be so much nicer.
- jmmv 1y agoI don’t understand: what makes this “DOS-like”? Not even the command names match DOS, except for dir and cls, and the architecture and feature set are completely different.
- paulannesley 1y agoSingle-user, single-task, VGA text-mode operating system with a basic filesystem (fat12), I guess. Note the “guest” username in the prompt is a const, not multi-user: https://github.com/krustowski/rou2exOS/blob/6f85955dd339f09d668bde32ac9b996d1d6eda6b/src/init/config.rs#L1 https://github.com/krustowski/rou2exOS/blob/6f85955dd339f09d...
- klank 1y agoThe original blog post has more details: https://krusty.space/projects/rourexos/ https://krusty.space/projects/rourexos/ Ultimately, it's an eye of the beholder type thing, but it seems very fair to call it DOS-like to me. The DOS inspiration is pretty blatant all throughout it from its aesthetic, commands (more than just dir and cls is shared), booting from a 1.44 floppy, etc. And if you are coming from a primarily windows computing background, then "DOS-like" is entirely appropriate to me. It looks like a fun project.
- jmmv 1y agoAh yes, the first version does indeed sound DOS-like. The second one diverges quite a bit though. Fun project indeed.
- krustowski 1y agoYou are right, it goes way ahead the first iteration. I call it DOS-like because of its resemblance to the Text mode-only operating systems (and to MS-DOS especially). On the other hand, it shares very little as the architecture, command set, or hardware utilization approach are concerned when compared to MS-DOS.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 90s_dev 1y agoIs this using a custom VGA driver from scratch in Rust??
- 90s_dev 1y agosrc https://github.com/krustowski/rou2exOS/tree/master/src/vga https://github.com/krustowski/rou2exOS/tree/master/src/vga
- krustowski 1y agoSort of, but IMO that module(s) is just a wrapper for video buffer.
- m00dy 1y agoit needs event queue to support async runtimes.
- krustowski 1y agoHow about the event loop in its completeness?
- pndy 1y agoAre you planning adding support for Czech diacritics?
- krustowski 1y agoI am not at the moment. The goal is to keep this iteration in English for now. The first iteration was in Czech in the beginning though.
- Toritori12 1y agoGood job OP, what a missed opportunity to say: "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Linux" (:
- ta12653421 1y agoCan it run Crysis?? :-))