embryo2 wrote:Brendan wrote:What a single person can do is create an OS without many drivers and without many applications, but is enough to attract other developers; and then (with the help of others and no longer as a single person) create an OS that other people can use.
It's possible, but quality is a very time consuming endeavor.
A single person could also adapt a Linux distribution that compiled only the drivers for the present devices and also a PC emulator. Then you can use any drivers from Linux to complete this big unified abstraction layer.
Creating such abstraction layer and emulation/virtualization including ALL modern drivers and functions to then use the machine with simplicity should be done without a doubt
first before anything else along with a boot sector and boot manager (using both Sound Blaster or AC'97 capabilities and known ports making them selectable as Sound Card Modes, ATA or SATA, perfect standard VGA implementation and a set of standardized ports and memory regions for hardware and 3D acceleration up to HD screen resolutions).
Is it based in Linux? It doesn't matter. It's a different project from our own OS. It's more an open-source firmware update that standardizes all machines but without having to alter or destroy the real present motherboard firmware. It has all the drivers that we want to use, but instead of using them we can use them to standardize the hardware environment through emulation and paravirtualization.
It could fit a floppy and the only thing it would do would be presenting a standardized PC hardware and software environment to run any other system on top of it. It would make possible to even run Windows 1.0, 3.0, Windows 9x, or very old 8088 software cleanly if configured, and regulate the execution speed without modifying the old binaries. It would run no matter if it's a modern machine.
It all should fit in a small and unimportant memory region like counting and allocating from the very end of non-reserved installed RAM (to be shown as a reserved region in the BIOS memory map, and of course protected to make it impossible to access it from the upper emulated machine system presented. Like a BIOS ROM from a card, it shouldn't need to reserve memory randomly or dynamically really since it would only need the support code to sustain the emulation).
It would look like a PC with a standard BIOS, would always include legacy devices and legacy peripherals like Sound Blaster sound. It would present a BIOS setup program to configure the transparent virtual machine. It should include functions which hardware doesn't have, purely in software. At least in this way a machine version will always have those extensions present in one way or another (the same as when emulating the FPU was necessary... probably modern hardware isn't mature enough to be both fully standard and complex).
That (implementing standard capabilities in software in case they are needed... we will need that in an OS anyway) as well as the development of our actual OS should be the starting point of the actual OS tasks we should perform and implement.
), you would get something impressive pretty quickly. But we don't have these conditions in reality, so it's not going to happen.
