Posts Tagged ‘threads’
My own OS
I’m posting this because everyone’s talking about Apple’s GCD. Which is a similar technology to the one included in my OS, however I’ve been developing it since Dec 2008, so there’s no relationship.
Apple got the wrong idea, mine is far better :P. Now, let me explain it:
Until recently my OS was just a bunch of papers and code snippets, but is progressing now :). It’s something completely different from any other OS, and while it will retain some compatibility (i.e. you will be able to run POSIX code on it), it’s designed to work in a very different way.
It aims to be an efficient OS, focused on desktop systems, with security in mind. Being desktop-focused just means it will be optimized for that role, but tunning it a bit you could make perform well on embedded hardware as well as giant NUMA systems.
It’s main objective is security. To achieve this goal I had to slightly redesign a lot of concepts which make an OS. One of those concepts is the API.
Since I’m trying to achieve as much security as possible (when it seems reasonable), it must enforce the concept of lowest privilege whenever possible. To make this feasible, applications are divided into modules, and while this division is explicit, it must be simple enough to make it the standard.
The solution is the development of a “components” concept. It requires a new executable format, but lets you easily divide programs into small chunks that could run in parallel (on-demand). This is where the similarity with Apple’s GCD ends.
The aforementioned “components” are completely independent, and not even share the same address space. They communicate through a lightweight IPC API which provides message queues, asynchronous RPC, transactions, and shared memory.
Another interesting feature is that it’s designed to be completely asynchronous.
Sadly I have not much time as I would wish to work on it…
