Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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The reason to have a "construction kit" for a given thing is that you are constructing a thing involving a huge amount of choices.

A programming language, an operating system and a database management system are all examples of complex, high level things involving such plethora of choices.

Programming languages have a variety of construction kits of various sorts, from Bison and Yacc to regular compilers and so-forth.

I hadn't heard of any equivalent kit for OSes or database system. Unfortunately, what's described gives the impression of producing a rudimentary system based on a few canned choices. I mean, fully producing an OS would involves generating calling conventions, device driver conventions, process convention, memory allocation methods, etc. (I'm far from an expert on this btw).

Sure, you can say "but all that's just done for you". It probably is done for you ... one particular way. But as far I know, the reason to produce a new OS is because you have some opinion how this stuff should work, usually because you're actually producing an OS to be use by some device and that device some needs and weirdness that needs to be taken into account.

Edit: Oh wait, just remembered, people are now creating "OSes" that are just app-containers intended to run AWS. If that's what you need, maybe this works.

OSKit developed in the University of Utah systems group was a...OS kit back in the mid-late 90s, I don’t think they were the first ones (would ya e to go back through some old OSDI/SOSP papers to be sure though). See http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/.

Looks closer to what I'd imagine.

Check out Genode: https://genode.org/about/index

I think you have conflated the idea of an OS and kernel. A kernel generally handles calling conventions, device driver conventions, process conventions, memory allocation methods, etc. An OS just uses a kernel which has already decided on those conventions.

Personally I would argue the term "OS" is simply not that well defined, and the readme makes no attempt to clear that up which I think leads to confusion. What actually defines an OS vs. not an OS is a pretty blurry line, and more-over when someone talks about "OS development" 99.9% of the time they're talking about kernel development. So naturally calling something an "operating system kit" that lets you "create operating systems" makes you think of kernel development.

That said, I read the whole readme linked here, and not once does it actually explain what an 'operating system' is, so I personally think that's just a failure on their part in picking a name and explaining what exactly the intended use of their project is. If instead of using the term "operating system kit" they used the term "baremetal/kernel application SDK" (or something along those lines) I don't think anybody would be nearly as confused on what it is. But I'm not entirely sure that's a good name either because I'm really just not sure what you're supposed to use it for. I read the whole readme, but I'm still at a bit of a loss.

Don't get me wrong though, I still think it's a cool project, but mostly just for the code making up the 'Cosmos' kernel rather then the 'develop your own OS' aspect.

> Personally I would argue the term "OS" is simply not that well defined

An “operating system” is a combination of what the user sees, what developers see, and what devices see, I'd say.

If one wants to refer to the GUI, CLI, API, SDK, DDK or the kernel individually, just use those terms. :)

I have always thought of the kernel as being part of the OS, but maybe I'm wrong?

Some people think the kernel is the OS, some people think of the kernel as part of the OS, and apparently slimsag thinks of the kernel as something different than the OS.

They're just different naming conventions.

Other people have mentioned OSKit, but back in the day I also used oslib [1] to create a microkernel for my final engineering project.

[1] http://oslib.sourceforge.net/

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