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Sanos Operating System Kernel

jbox.dk

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Sanos is a minimalistic 32-bit x86 operating system kernel for network server appliances running on standard PC hardware. The kernel implements basic operating system services like booting, memory management, thread scheduling, local and remote file systems, TCP/IP networking and DLL loading and linking. You can use Sanos as a small kernel for embedded server applications written in C or as a JeOS (Just enough Operating System). Sanos has a fairly standard POSIX based API and an ANSI Standard C library.

The kernel was developed as part of an experiment on investigating the feasibility of running java server applications without a traditional operating system only using a simple kernel. A win32 layer allowed the Windows version of a standard HotSpot JVM to run under Sanos, essentially providing a JavaOS platform for server applications.

While Sanos is self-contained in the sense that it can build itself, it can be cross-compiled under either Windows using Microsoft Visual C, or under Linux using GCC. Sanos applications can either be built under Windows using MSVC or under Sanos itself using the Sanos SDK.

WWW: http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/index.htm Source: https://github.com/ringgaard/sanos

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[quote] Last, I need to address a controversial question: Was it a good idea implementing my own operating system? Short answer: Probably not! While I managed to prove my initial hypothesis that complex operating systems are not needed to run Java server applications, I could probably have done this without having to implement my own operating system. From a practical point of view, I could just have made a bare bone Linux installation, which is what I would recommend to most people who want to try this, and this is what we are doing where I work now. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun making Sanos, and I learned a lot doing it, also many things that are useful even if your job is not implementing operating systems. [/quote] And it hasn't had a update since Mar 8, 2012? Or is it continuing on Github?

Thanks for the awesome work! If the purpose is to run specific apps with minimal OS, can buildroot or some container-based approach achieve the same goal?

I'm just the messenger, I like the project too. >>container-based Just create a boot image. Qemu works out of the box.

On the Homepage exist Emails exchangedwith the creator. It was a brian fart to move on to a exokernel 5 years ago.

Exokernel are on Ring 0. For any hardware virtualization, this is the perfect optimization in large cloud installations. Exokernel are easy to manage from ring -1 VM software. And can boot in < 100 ms.

So a application node can be add to cloud setup or reboot after a crash. Btw the author is working at a big search engine since over 10 year.

Alternatively, unikernels like Erlang on Xen.

I find this a very good idea, but since the latest news update was 2012, how has Sanos kept up with security vulnerabilities?

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