''Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.'' – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981.
SqueakNOS was an attempt to get Squeak running on x86 pcs without an underlying OS. The aim was to push as much of the hardware interface into the image as possible.
The MathMorphs swiki seems to be down at the moment (3-Mar-2004), so I hope you don't mind me moving some SqueakNOS information here – SqueakNOS.
There wasn't any traffic on the SqueakNOS email list in 2003, however having downloaded the project in 2001 and see it work on bare metal, I still remain impressed by it. There's obviously a lot of work yet to be done, which is in a way why I'm still interested.
What a great opportunity for the folks that use Squeak as a tool in education to be able to teach people about how things really work under the hood.
Write a TCP/IP stack.
Research different process scheduling strategies.
Go wild and question the estabilished thinking.
Invent a new networking protocol (see Croquet)
Why do we have folders and files on disks? What else could we have?
In an effort to get more people interested in SqueakNOS SqueakNOS has made a 4mb Bootable CD ISO image.
If you have an x86 machine which supports booting from CD (The BIOS supports "El Torito"), you can boot your machine straight into Squeak. Which is the point of the project.
OliBye is interested in using Bryce Kampjes Exupery project which can compile some smalltalk bytecodes to x86 machine code. Having read the introduction and looked at the code a little, it looks like it would be possible to use Exupery to write device drivers on the fly inside SqueakNOS. Rather than write them in Slang and have to compile them into the VM.
The major stumbling block to this is that you can't currently save any changes you make inside SqueakNOS. So if you have any desire to develop for SqueakNOS, I suggest that persisting change sets anywhere is the most important story to work on.
There is mention on the email lists of patch to save change sets out to on the serial port. – OliBye
One cool bit of technology that might be able to lift SqueakNOS up onto it's feet might be: http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/csl/projects/obje/default.html ... a fair bit of serendipity, it coming from PARC.
It would be fairly easy to use Exupery to write device drivers. Just add memoryAt: and memoryAtPut: bytecodes to directly access memory. Write and debug the device drivers in interpreted Smalltalk then compile them to make them faster. But wait for at least the 0.04 release.– Bryce Kampjes
Missing File (/squeak/uploads/SqueakNOS.rar) contains a VMware setup that should be playable with VMware player. This makes it much easier to develop SqueakNOS, I think. Cees de Groot
