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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

While this is ridiculously cool, I think the project missed an opportunity by tying itself so tightly to x86 assembly. A system that is usable with 8MB of RAM? Hell yeah. Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this under-powered; these kinds of systems are actually getting more expensive, as they're slowly getting relabeled as "vintage". You can of course run this on a much more powerful machine (say 1GB of RAM and maybe even a second core), but at that point you could also opt for a more featureful OS like OpenBSD or Haiku, which will actually make better use of the extra resources.

But what if you could run Kolibri on a tiny, DIY, microcontroller-based computer? An ATmega or Cortex-M0, throw in some SRAM and I2C peripherals, run it off a couple of AA batteries and browse the web on that? That'd be ludicrously cool.

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A typical ESP32 S3 nowadays comes with 4 to 8 MB of RAM. Very likely more. Already comes with bluetooth and Wifi for 5 to 10 USD.

Would certainly enjoy have an GUI-based OS like this running on it.

Check out the Parallax Propeller, there is a GUI-based OS for it. And Forth, at the same time.

Doesn't look promissing, sorry. Was looking and looking, but where is the GUI-based OS?

Nowadays we can use LVGL and C++ to write apps, or run script based C code using interpreters like Wrench: https://github.com/jingoro2112/wrench

What I'm missing is an GUI-based OS like Kolibri to launch apps.

https://www.parallax.com/display-gui-and-multimedia-options-...

ESP32 has no display hardware even if it is more powerful than many computers of the 80’s those did come with dedicated graphics/display cards.

Modern display signaling takes a lot of compute power simply due to the sheer complexity of it and even emulating something like VGA over I/O pins would eat most of not all the compute power available on an MCU.

So you’re essentially stuck with a terminal over the network with an ESP which if you again make graphical would cost more in rendering and stream compression than there is compute so you’re stuck with text based terminals.

You can run a passable GUI over SPI using displays with an integrated frame buffer. LVGL in particular is a GUI lib optimized to render strips of updated data rather than full frames and it performs well with such devices.

Yes, I've been doing that. LVGL is amazing. Still, I'm waiting for the time when we have a GUI-based OS available. The possibility of running scripts that work as apps from a memory card and so on.

My apologies but that statement is the same as saying that a Pentium IV has no display hardware. You are right that a CPU has no display card but missed the point because we speak here about support for running an OS on that CPU in connection with peripherals.

Nowadays you can buy ESP32 boards that include touchscreen displays, memory card readers and so on for 13 euros with shipping included: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006110360174.html

Don't even understand what you mean with "a lot of compute power". We've been using LVGL for GUI apps and playing movies on these devices since a long time just fine. Here is a demonstration of that board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AVyvwv0agk

I've been wondering for a long time when we're going to get an open OS for making app-capable ESP32 stuff. We've got the Cardputer and the t-keyboard, the hardware is there.

This stuff even has mesh networking, and yet we still don't have Cybikos!

> A system that is usable with 8MB of RAM? Hell yeah.

I remember finding outrageous that Linux required at least 8MB to run X Window System back in 1995. How far have we come.

I ran X on 4MB. It was heavily dependent on swap but it was just about usable for basic things especially if the application was a remote client.

This is the floppy to bring onto the DeLorean. Relatively, today that would go to the early nighties. Pop that into into the Aptiva/AST, and go blow your own mind with this, and probably the timeline too.

Yep. I imagine adding support for different CPU architectures will be... well good luck with that.

Perhaps not every OS needs to be portable like Linux...

This reminds me the time when Linus said that linux will be hard to port to other architectures, since it is tightly coupled with the 386 architecture...

Certainly would've been less easy without large community contributions.

Just shows that he didn’t have much knowledge of other platforms or didn’t have much vision about where his project would go. Fact is if you squint enough every modern system looks like a VAX. The same abstractions fit nearly every architecture.

At the time he said that he was not wrong. There were huge chunks of .s files that did interesting asm things.

> Yep. I imagine adding support for different CPU architectures will be... well good luck with that.

Extremely hard indeed, probably more like a 95% rewrite. Might however make sense as a killer application for small ARM or Risc-V boards where Linux would be either overkill or too demanding.

Would it be possible to make a "naive port" by replacing cisc instructions with essentially risc microcode (almost like how processors work now)?

> Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this under-powered

You don't need a machine with exactly 8MB. Nowadays having 1GB RAM is under-powered enough that you'll probably have more fun with Kolibri than with a regular OS.

Correct, but with 1GB available I'd be much more tempted to run Haiku ;)

A cool DIY computer project could be a free re-creation of computers of the past. I believe it would make sense re-running the path of computer history, but pushing more and more open-source in it. You already can buy a NuXT, based on Sergey Kiselev's work to provide DIY resources to create a PC XT computer (including the BIOS).

I thought someone could enlarge the design to a more modern architecture when I found an old Compaq internal documentation showing the internal design of the first commercially available 80386 computer (Compaq Deskpro 386). I have just posted the reference on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38480275

Such new re-created computers would certainly be interesting to run legacy software, but it would also be very interesting to have modern and light-weigth software like KolibriOS (I know it requires a Pentium or more, but there is certainly little to change to downgrade to 80386).

What about a use case of VMs? You could run hundreds potentially on a single host.

For that use case, you have a lot of far better specialized unikernels to choose from.

Can you provide some examples please.

I work with https://nanos.org && https://ops.city - we can run thousands of these on commodity hardware.

Thank you. I have been interested in micro vms (as a layman curious) since I've heard of firecracker but was never able to find any similar projects. Maybe i should have been looking for nano vms. Cheers.

https://xkcd.com/350/

> I think the project missed an opportunity by tying itself so tightly to x86 assembly.

What sort of "opportunity" did authors miss? They're not a business.

Or is writing ARM assembler necessarily more fun than writing x86?

> What sort of "opportunity" did authors miss? They're not a business.

From GP:

> Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this under-powered; these kinds of systems are actually getting more expensive, as they're slowly getting relabeled as "vintage"

I think that not having enough x86 hardware is the least of authors' worries ...

Yeah but it’s hard to find the hardware this OS is designed for. There’s little need for it. Compared to the oodles or low powered arm boards out there that would love this. So the missed opportunity is just that a lot of effort has gone into a very narrow platform that would probably be more appreciated on a diff platform

Super cool project though of course

It's a shame that the embedded x86 market died with the Geode and the C7, for a while you could legitimately find fairly cheap embedded devices with x86 chips under the hood.

Did it, though? Apparently you can buy i586-on-a-SoC boards, they seem to be quite popular in the retro/vintage gaming community.