OSDev.org

I just had a glance at the OSKit : (http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/). Currently I am struggling to have a successful build. Not quite familiar with it yet.

So I wish those who had ever touched it could share their experience. How does it look like? Many thanks.

Well, based on the release dates, it seems to have been dead for around eight years...

NickJohnson wrote:Well, based on the release dates, it seems to have been dead for around eight years...

Yes, indeed.

The reason I came to OSKit is that I don't want to write so many device drivers for my experiment OS. Currently, I am hoping it could relieve me from writing floppy and/or hard disk drivers. Is OSKit really useless now? Any good suggestions if OSKit is too dead to be revived.

smwikipedia wrote:The reason I came to OSKit is that I don't want to write so many device drivers for my experiment OS. Currently, I am hoping it could relieve me from writing floppy and/or hard disk drivers. Is OSKit really useless now? Any good suggestions if OSKit is too dead to be revived.

One of the forum members (Kevin) in another thread suggested a look at CDI for drivers.

http://lpt.tyndur.org/cdi/english/

Well, it's almost definitely not useless, regardless of if it's dead or not. However, it shouldn't be much of a problem to write ATA and floppy drivers if you already have an OS capable of supporting them (i.e. you need a heap, IRQ handling, and probably some sort of DMA memory manager), although other drivers may be a bit more valuable. The main problem I see is that since the project is dead, so is, in effect, its driver interface - likely, nobody will be writing more drivers for OSKit any time soon. However, there are at least two driver interfaces that people have been advocating on this forum (CDI and UDI), which probably have at least ATA and floppy drivers and whose developers would undoubtedly be grateful for another allied project.

Just my 2 cents...

berkus wrote:OSKit is dead, but what's worse, you need gcc 2.95.4 to build it. It's written in very ancient dialect of C that only older gcc can cope with.

I spent some time fixing the compile bugs in OSKit and finally decided it wasn't worth it.

I spent last night to compile gcc 2.95.2, which the OSKit team claimed to be able to compile with. My ubuntu 8.10 is installed with GCC 4.3.2, so I took the approach to compile the most ancient version of GCC as possible and all the way back to the 2.95.2. But it failed. I finnally got the following path through:

4.3.2 --> 3.3.6 --> 2.75.2.3 ( though I found that 4.3.2 can compile 2.75.2.3 directly)

Though OSKit team claims that they compile with 2.75.x, BUT THE OSKIT STILL DONT BUILD WITH GCC 2.75.2.3...

Hands up...

It's not only the GCC that's involved. You also have to consider other dependencies (e.g. binutils).

Downgrading your compiler isn't a viable option. If no-one can be bothered to upgrade the source to latest tools version, it's a good sign that the source isn't worth it.

berkus wrote:Can you state what features of OSKit do you really need?

Hi berkus,
I have to say I am not quite familiar with the OSKit yet. I just heard about it from stackoverflow.com yesterday. Currently the most attractive thing to me is the device drivers and its modular design. I hope it can help me focus less on the tedious device driver development.

This is that thread :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623 ... otect-mode


And here is yet another related thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3693 ... latest-gcc

BTW: the version is not 2.75.2.3, it's 2.7.2.3

I believe someone here has prebuilt binaries of OSKit. It's been a while since I've been here, so I forget exactly who
Though I remember it's a very high-profile member, so ask around, someone has binaries...

What do you mean? He( the OP) can just statically link with the libraries.

Generally speaking, if your code is depending on something you cannot build from sources yourself, you're abandoning a whole set of options. Some people feel stronger about it, some not so strong, but I would be very reluctant to base anything on years-old binaries from an obviously abandoned project.

Hi smwikipedia,
I have compiled OSKit long back . I had vector linux 4.3 installed ( It came with some gcc 3.x i guess ) and I compiled gcc 2.95.xx on it and installed it and was able to compile oskit successfully. Another way of doing it would be getting the root file system of any of those older distro's and then chroot ing into them.

I have'nt used it all, I just compiled it and learned by reading source code. That's about it .


--Thomas