OSDev.org

http://sites.google.com/site/scorchopsy ... menthalted

This is partly for the benefit of those of you following the project (also posted on the mailing list) but also in case anyone wanted to make use of the existing code and/or even take over the development of ScorchOS.

Thanks to everyone on this forum who has assisted in the past and all those who have contributed code, written on the mailing list and send me ideas/encouragement. All this was much appreciated, and these will no doubt encourage me to return to kernel development again one day in the future.

hey!

first, i'm sorry to hear that development's halted.
but yeah, good luck with freshman year!
mine was not that nice, hope your's is better.


second, http://sites.google.com/site/thehackerl ... esearch-os

that's what i'm working on.
however, i guess there's an opportunity here.
how about i try and port the mono framework over to your os?
it seems to have enough posix compliance..
what say??

Hi Redoktober,

Thanks for your interest in the project - your blueprint for an OS does look interesting. If you'd like to see other C# based kernels (that you could perhaps use as a base) then a few examples would be Cosmos and TysOS.

In terms of porting a Mono environment it is possible to get that to work. However, you would need a working cross-compiler (naturally!) and this would require various base memory routines for whatever language the Mono Runtime is written in (you would need to port a C or C++ library, or produce some kind of implementation for the required methods within the kernel itself, as I'm guessing the Mono runtime is an interpreter). My pet project was the C++ kernel, but the FreeBASIC one (despite being poorly written) was the most sophisticated.

Essentially the reason I've stopped developing ScorchOS for the time being is due to time-constraints, but if I do randomly get a free weekend and in that time get a working cross-compiler with ported libraries and runtime that need only require some implementation in a kernel for them to be used, then I guess work on the C++ kernel (codenamed 'Bluebird') could continue (I've seen the tutorials on the wiki). However, I am very unlikely to get this window of opportunity for quite a while (we're talking months here, with no guarantees it'll work by then) hence the announcement.

An update to this announcement:
http://sites.google.com/site/scorchopsy ... manhimself

ScorchOS will eventually be rekindled. However, there's no time frame for this and development work won't be uploaded to the SVN repo for the time being (because I'm still writing prototype code for concepts I'm working on). I also won't promise yet another featureset as they invariably get scrapped well before release.

However, I aim to avoid stupid architectural decisions, and will not for example use a tutorial kernel, include a shell in the kernel executable or use a language I don't know (all of these have succeeded in killing my previous kernel projects stone dead).

Now I'm enrolled on a BSc (Hons) Computer Science course (on my second year now!) I'm now getting a much better understanding of operating systems, hardware, etc. and should hopefully avoid some of my previous mistakes by knowing more about the theory and technical aspects required for kernel dev. I'm currently fiddling around with a bootloader and a few interesting platform ideas, but I will announce on this board if this ever comes to anything.