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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Might be fun. My spare-time projects fully support Plan 9, why not muck around with another zombie OS? EDID parsing should be easy, but the USB stack will be painful. And supporting "real" video hardware would be a pain. I'd have to figure out if it can run it on some hardware I own first, though.

Realistically, though, this is likely to fall by the wayside, since I only have so many hours a day coding, and enough of it is spent at work.

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Oberon is a pretty interesting system to muck with.

Another approach is to blackbox USB and HDMI, and consider them outside the project, much like the VGA monitor or whatever is in the keyboard to send PS/2 signals. You can connect to spare IOs on the FPGA board with 'blackbox' hardware, as long as protocols are simple and open.

Exactly. I often recommend that anyway. Let's you offload all the interrupts and often plenty pre-processing. And microcontrollers with onboard peripherals are more numerous, powerful, and cheap than ever before. So many possibilities there.

I downloaded as much of the source of Bluebottle as I can. I'm glad the OP gave me the link to the modern one. I'll get it too. Think I might try to retarget it in one of the safer languages, secure hardware (eg Cambrige CHERI processor), or certified compilers. Oberon is the kind of thing a one-man project can make progress on. On other side, I think I recently saw another team quit after little progress on rewriting NetBSD in something safer. ;)

what were they re-writing NetBSD in? can you share a link to more information?

I don't have the link anymore. Doesn't matter. Despite NetBSD's portability and good design, it was simply too complicated and connected to C style for them to pull off the re-write. Oberon, on the other hand, has the whole OS written in a type-safe language with good modularity and is a lot simpler. Should be a much easier re-write.

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