Singularity source code available for download

Colonel Kernel · Post by **Colonel Kernel** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:20 am

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

Now we can see how it actually works...

xyzzy · Post by **xyzzy** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:28 am

Hmm... I was wondering if they would ever open source it yesterday. Maybe MS have been reading my thoughts

Anyway, I'll be taking a look over it later today

jzgriffin · Post by **jzgriffin** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 2:21 am

Singularity seems to be an interesting project. I've been following their progress for several months now. This was mentioned earlier on IRC, but I haven't had time to look at the code yet. Thanks for posting a link, I'd forgotten to bookmark it.

senaus · Post by **senaus** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 7:45 am

Oooh, I've been waiting for this

Now I've got decent bedtime reading material

astrocrep · Post by **astrocrep** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:56 am

Anyone tried to get it up and running?

Or better yet... build it?

I am very excited to dive into the code and take a look around!

-Rich

lollynoob · Post by **lollynoob** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 3:55 pm

Looking at the bootloader right now, and so far (from the bootsectors and singldr) it looks pretty awful.

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shl     eax, 5                  ; (assume no overflow)

Sounds safe.

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else if (startKB + sizeKB >= Struct_Microsoft_Singularity_BootInfo_MAX_VIRTUAL_ADDR / 1024ul) {
      sm[i].size.hi = 0;
      sm[i].size.lo = Struct_Microsoft_Singularity_BootInfo_MAX_VIRTUAL_ADDR - startKB * 1024;

Loving the concise constant names.

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BdPrintString("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n", 80);

Nice horizontal rule!

I'm not sure if this is some sort of weird publicity stunt or what, but a lot of it looks really hackish and generally bad.

Edit: I guess they learned C and ASM on the fly or something; the C# parts (the kernel and whatnot) actually look pretty nice. As nice as object-oriented code can look, anyways.

Alboin · Post by **Alboin** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:08 pm

lollynoob wrote:

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else if (startKB + sizeKB >= Struct_Microsoft_Singularity_BootInfo_MAX_VIRTUAL_ADDR / 1024ul) {
      sm[i].size.hi = 0;
      sm[i].size.lo = Struct_Microsoft_Singularity_BootInfo_MAX_VIRTUAL_ADDR - startKB * 1024;

Loving the concise constant names.

My God. 'Struct_Microsoft_Singularity_BootInfo_MAX_VIRTUAL_ADDR'? They're ... kidding .. aren't they?

os.hacker64 · Post by **os.hacker64** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:18 pm

jzgriffin · Post by **jzgriffin** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:54 pm

You never read the leaked source code for Win2k or WinNT, or even any Microsoft code examples? They love ridiculously long and obvious names. Either my ability to tell jokes from seriousness sucks, or they actually considered naming IE8 "IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet" (source). It certainly sounds Microsoft-ish.

Anyways, I'm back in Windows for the first time since Feb. 24th, so I'll see if I can compile it while I'm here.

Colonel Kernel · Post by **Colonel Kernel** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:24 pm

I'm betting those long names are required for using C# constructs from C++ or asm. Most likely the C# namespaces get munged into long_names_with_underscores in the symbol table.

@lollynoob: You realize this is a research OS and not a commercial product, right?

jzgriffin · Post by **jzgriffin** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 12:19 am

I just looked at a hex dump of a C# executable produced by gmcs. There were no long underscored names like that. It's a Microsoft thing.

Anyways, I lost interest in the code. It's not as fancy and clean looking as I imagined, sadly.

Colonel Kernel · Post by **Colonel Kernel** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 12:52 am

Jeremiah Griffin wrote:I just looked at a hex dump of a C# executable produced by gmcs. There were no long underscored names like that. It's a Microsoft thing.

Yes, exactly. Singularity's dialect of C# is compiled with Bartok, which emits native code, not assemblies containing IL as gmcs and friends do.

Anyways, I lost interest in the code. It's not as fancy and clean looking as I imagined, sadly.

In my experience, no kernel code is. It's just a grotty, detail-infested kind of domain to work in.

If you want elegance, look at compilers for higher-level languages (written in those same languages) instead.

xyzzy · Post by **xyzzy** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 1:12 am

I haven't dived into the code yet, but I've got it up and running with Virtual PC. The PDF in the source .zip details everything you need to do pretty well, except netbooting with VPC: You need to do

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boottest.cmd /net singularity.vmc

That starts up the netboot server program automatically (you need to have done the loopback setup stuff).

If you build everything (the World target), however, it takes eons to start from the netboot server.

Oh and one more thing, WinDbg is evil to work with

xyzzy · Post by **xyzzy** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:07 am

Just uploaded some screenshots of it here

Managed to get the webserver "working", it's a bit rusty but it seems to work, you can see it in sing5.jpg. Sorry about the bad quality of the JPGs, all I had was Paint and it likes to save JPGs in crap quality.

binutils · Post by **binutils** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:51 am

Jeremiah Griffin wrote: Anyways, I lost interest in the code. It's not as fancy and clean looking as I imagined, sadly.

FYI, another c# os http://gocosmos.org/

--
PS: i haven't looked at both os c# code.