BareMetal: A 64-bit OS in 16kb | Hacker News Reader

BareMetal: A 64-bit OS in 16kb

returninfinity.com

109 pointsprofquail25 comments

"BareMetal is ready... Current plans call for the ability to write data back to the disk."

Curious definition of "ready." :)

Depends what you're doing. Netboot, receive compute tasks from the network, complete them and send them back, you don't even need a disk :-)

Good plan, but:

"Future versions will call for ... network support"

Well, to be fair there are millions of embedded devices that read from ROM and never write to disk. So this would be an excellent study for those type of systems.

My Favorite "Bare Bones" System - Starting with Logic Gates, then assembler, then virtual machine, a language, compiler, and finally, operating system as a very high level construct:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

There's also MenuetOS (http://www.menuetos.net/) if you've never seen it before. It's kind of like a Live CD, except it's written in assembly and fits on a 1.44MB floppy (if you remember what those are!)

Shameless plug: if you're looking for something a little more full-featured but maybe not quite as small, take a look at Kitten https://software.sandia.gov/trac/kitten. It's still a minimal OS (LWK: lightweight kernel), but it has thinks like.. disks and networking.

Is it just me, or is a swath of source missing? The Pure64 secondary loader which does a lot of interesting tasks to do with understanding the processor appears to be binary only.

Another great education OS is xv6 from MIT

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/xv6-book/index.html

That's really cool. I can't imagine ever having any use for it as software personally but I it's small enough that I just read a large chunk of the code in not too much time. Awesome :)

Well done - I love projects like this and think it has great potential both as a utility and a teaching tool: particularly impressed with the little 64-bit ASM tutorial.

Great website too...but it's missing a donation button!

I think I found your design inspiration for that website! http://www.discoapp.com/

Is that your site or was it just something you remembered? If it is your site, I have to tell you the logo/icon is stellar.

This is one of those times where I wish I had a real laptop instead of a netbook. This looks like a lot of fun (I've never taken the time to learn assembly, and I've never written a driver or compiler).

Ahh well.

According to Wikipedia, the Intel Atom 230, 330, and D-series support 64-bit code, so you might still be able to try this (if you really wanted to). They've got a virtual machine edition available for download on the site, but you probably need to have a 64-bit OS installed to run it, and I doubt you're running one on a netbook ;)

Try Bochs. It will be more than fast enough for something like this.

When trying to download the VM (link at bottom of BareMetal page), I get a virus warning ("probably a variant of Win32/Genetik") from ESET Nod32 (my antivirus software). Anyone else get this or have any problems?

I doubt that a 16k file with an OS in it manages to accommodate a virus too.

It's probably heuristics, AV software is very picky about stuff that does booting a system or have very optimized code. You see this kind of alert in the demo scene quite often too, because AV also don't like their packing algorithms.

The problem with these approaches are that they're inflexible. Most parts are hardcoded closing the way for further development.

I'd love to see an educational micro-kernel OS, something like L4.

How about the infamous Minix? http://www.minix3.org/

out of subject.. but, do you know what is the theme used in screenshot?

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