Is your OS self-hosting? Or is it one of your goals?

earlz · Post by **earlz** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 8:50 pm

hmmmm
well my OS is currently declared as "paused" but if I want anything to be self hosting then it would be my Open86 emulation project but I would have to get 32bit opcodes...and I'm not even done with 8086 opcodes!

inflater · Post by **inflater** » Tue Dec 26, 2006 4:01 am

When the FAT12 driver is done, i will try to port FASM under PortixOS and make at least some programming environment

And when IRQs are done too - well, I will make some applications for real mode kernel and after all that I will try to switch under "blessed Protected Mode" and make some kernel in C++.

inflater

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 6:34 am

Yes, that is a goal of mine, but not until after I have it to a point where it is as easy to program in as my current setup is. No point in self hosting with a crappy line editor that takes me 5x as long to write programs, and even longer to reboot and test, when I can just run bochs to test changes and get it right before attempting the real machine. Also, if I can type faster here than some crappy editor (like, cut/paste, very simple to see my project files with the nice expandable tree's, etc), why would I want to self host? I will start porting compilers and editors over to my OS once I get my GUI finished up, and at least some version of text editors running within my GUI. I will even port bochs or Open86 (if it supports 32-bit mode and other stuff by then?), that way I can test my OS within my OS, but that is a far time off into the future.

Dex · Post by **Dex** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 4:57 pm

@Ready4Dis, i disagree with you, to me thats a copout, running something in bochs is like running a windows program in wine. Do not fall into the trap, YOU ARE CODING A OS, not a user program, it needs to be tested on a real PC.
You need to use it, from the beginning as a user would.
The gui stuff is just eyecandy, you can convert a good written editor from CLI to GUI in less than a week.
Also why do you need to do all that:

write programs, and even longer to reboot and test

to test your program, when you can write and assemble and run from you OS's IDE
Like this: http://jas2o.forthworks.com/dexforum/in ... attach=135

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:08 pm

Dex wrote:@Ready4Dis, i disagree with you, to me thats a copout, running something in bochs is like running a windows program in wine. Do not fall into the trap, YOU ARE CODING A OS, not a user program, it needs to be tested on a real PC.
You need to use it, from the beginning as a user would.
The gui stuff is just eyecandy, you can convert a good written editor from CLI to GUI in less than a week.
Also why do you need to do all that:
write programs, and even longer to reboot and test
to test your program, when you can write and assemble and run from you OS's IDE
Like this: http://jas2o.forthworks.com/dexforum/in ... attach=135

Heh, well, I am still working on kernel mode stuff, so it would require a reboot, or at least a reload of the kernel and/or modules. Once I get to that point, I will start working on self hosting. I do want to self host, but don't see a reason to until it is actually useable

. Not like I can write a keyboard driver in my OS if one doesn't exist already. I am working on re-writing a lot of it, once I get my kernel where I want it, I will worry about self hosting. Self host now, find out I want major changes to my kernel later, need to re-compile all self-hosting tools again, and probably from another OS. I do use a real PC for testing, but there is no reason to do so if it crashes in bochs. Once it runs fine in bochs, then I write it to my HD and boot (I have a seperate partition just for my OS, and a custom MBR that allows me to choose a partition to boot that is only 512 bytes, and works with winxp and dos without issues, haven't tried linux but assume it will work the same).

Dex · Post by **Dex** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:19 pm

Sorry i thought this new kernel, was fever down the Dev path.

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:39 pm

Dex wrote:Sorry i thought this new kernel, was fever down the Dev path.

Nah, I wish, lol, not enough time to work on it though, once I get to a point where work on the actual kernel is done (well, not done, but functioning propely!) is when I will begin building tools for self hosting.

Edwin · Post by **Edwin** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 5:17 pm

I don't think it should be a goal for my OS to be self-hosting, although it would be nice to be self-hosting. My main goal is to make a usable OS.

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 4:46 am

Edwin wrote:I don't think it should be a goal for my OS to be self-hosting, although it would be nice to be self-hosting. My main goal is to make a usable OS.

If it's useable, then it should be self-hosting

. When I think about a useable OS, I think about an OS I can boot up, type some code, and make programs for, not something that requires me to boot into windows, link some specific lib's, compile, use another utility to copy files to the other Os's partition, reboot into that OS and test my app

.

spix · Post by **spix** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 7:21 pm

If it's useable, then it should be self-hosting

That depends on the type of OS it is. I doubt the guys at Palm develop their OS with s stylus.

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 7:35 pm

spix wrote:
If it's useable, then it should be self-hosting
That depends on the type of OS it is. I doubt the guys at Palm develop their OS with s stylus.

lol, this is probably true

. My OS will be multi-platform, and the pocket pc is one of my targets, I plan on being able to compile for my pocket pc from my OS on a PC, but I can definitely see why someone would not if it's a limited platform, but most people on here are developing for PC platforms primarily. Not all OS's need to be self hosting, for example, if you're writing a gaming OS, one wouldn't expect tools to be part of the OS, since the OS is mostly just a hardware abstraction layer, and the dev tools would more than likely be for linux or windows, etc. However, my dev tools will be compileable for my OS, and since my pocket pc will have a libc, there would be no reason why I couldn't compile the compiler for the pocket pc and have it run and compile stuff on the pocket pc, who knows, maybe someone wants to distribute source code rather than executeables, that way they could compile it on the pocket pc and a regular pc, etc without having to compile for each platform themselves, just provide the sources, and let the user compile it to their platform (would work really good if the compiler flags were set depending on CPU as well, so one could compile for a mmx, sse, sse2, etc or use regular instructions if they aren't available for example). All in all, you are correct, I was thinking in terms of an x86, but even then it's not 100% true, there are special cases (as with everything really), but in the majority of the cases, I would think someone would want their OS self hosted if they plan on it being 'useable', unless it's one of the aforementioned special cases

.

Dex · Post by **Dex** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:10 am

DexOS was designed to be one of thoughs special cases, (as in it was designed to run 1 program, all day long eg: a dedicated m3p player, robotic, etc).
So the original idea was to code for it on a desktop like windows/linux.
But i had a lot of people saying, i do not want to keep having to reboot to test programs and as its a good demo of what the OS can do, i added it.

Ready4Dis · Post by **Ready4Dis** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 5:43 pm

Dex wrote:DexOS was designed to be one of thoughs special cases, (as in it was designed to run 1 program, all day long eg: a dedicated m3p player, robotic, etc).
So the original idea was to code for it on a desktop like windows/linux.
But i had a lot of people saying, i do not want to keep having to reboot to test programs and as its a good demo of what the OS can do, i added it.

Heh, see, told you it gets tiring rebooting to test programs

. Of course, there are tons of ways to do stuff without self hosting, you could have your OS connected to a network or serial or parallel port, and upload/run the programs as you are writing them, so you won't have to reboot or copy a bunch of stuff around, or worry about file systems. As stated, there are special cases were it probably won't be worth it to self-host (for example, a console game system, most games are written on the PC platform and uplaod the data to the console for testing). Something like a palm or pocket pc, I would develop on windows/linux and use an emulator for testing until it was functioning properly, then install it on an actual device to verify operation, it'd be a pain to type code with a stylus

.

inflater · Post by **inflater** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 11:38 am

Reincarnation of a old topic:

It is now

(Actually PortixOS doesn't operate in [un]real mode from now.)

Thanks to:
myself (programming, testing)
DexOS Team (for releasing source code of DexOS [No, PortixOS and DexOS aren't clones and they are incompatible between each other

])

inflater

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Mon Jul 16, 2007 12:42 am

I'm close to self-hosting, I just need to rewrite my filesystem driver and get program loading working. Newlib is already ported so I'm almost there.