CharlotteOS – An Experimental Modern Operating System (opens in new tab)

Why would you buy it’s more secure. Traditionally in windows in-kernel compositing was a constant source of security vulnerabilities. Sure rust may help the obvious memory corruption possibilities but I’m not convinced.

Why would you need to recompile if hardware changes? Linux manages just fine as a monolithic kernel that ships with support for many devices in the same kernel build.

A monolithic kernel and resource locators that automatically mount network drives? That's just macOS.

(You don't have to recompile the kernel if you put all the device drivers in it, just keep the object files around and relink it.)

Incremental compilation makes that a lot less heavyweight than you would think and the idea is to automate the process so the average non-technical user doesn't need to know or care how it works.

Does this mean that window management has to be handled in the kernel? Or is there some process that tells the kernel where those panes should be relative to one another/the framebuffer?

Chuck Multiaddr in there (https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/), can be used for URLs, file paths, network addresses, you name it. Easy to parse as well.

You can use a subset of easily parseable URIs

Quite common on Linux early days.

Also the only approach for systems where people advocate for static linking everything, yet another reason why dynamic loading became a thing.

Recompile (or at least relink) the kernel to change drivers (or even system configuration) is a bit of a blast from the past - in the 1960s thru 1980s it used to be a very common thing, it was called “system generation”. It was found in mainframe operating systems (e.g. OS/360, OS/VS1, OS/VS2, DOS/360); in CP/M; in Netware 2.x (3.x onwards dropped the need for it)

Most of these systems came with utilities to partially automate the process, some kind of config file to drive it, Netware 2.x even had TUI menuing apps (ELSGEN, NETGEN) to assist in it

If this kernel ever gets big enough where this might matter, I'm sure they can change the design. Nothing is set in stone forever and for the foreseeable future it's unlikely to matter.

Why? It can be fully automated just like dynamic module download and loading are.

Incremental compilation means you don't have to recompile everything just compile the new driver as a library and relink the kernel and you're done. Keep the prior n number of working ones around in case the new one doesn't work.

To be fair, the submission URL goes to the kernel specifically, so the README is good considering the repository it's in. The link I put earlier I found via the GitHub organization, which does give you an overview of the OS as a whole (not just the kernel): https://github.com/charlotte-os/

Paths are not full URIs. You can do hacks like /https:/example.com/foo but.. why?

I'm personally not at all convinced having a scheme multiplexer in front is a good thing, for a namespace like what a kernel would manage. It's just not really any different from having top-level /foo and /bar, and introduces a bunch of special cases. Windows drive letters suck for a reason.

Thanks. And there isn't much of a permanent team so far so if anyone wants to help then I'd be happy to hear from them on our Discord, Matrix or by email at charlotte-os@outlook.com.

Skimming https://doc.redox-os.org/book/scheme-rooted-paths.html and https://doc.redox-os.org/book/schemes.html , I think they've slightly reworked that to a more-unixy approach, but yeah still fundamentally more URI than traditional VFS

I don't think they will like Plan9 if file based everything is a turn off.

Did you know the Go language supports Plan9? You can create a binary from any system using GOOS=plan9 with amd64 and i386 supported. You might need to disable CGO and use libraries that don't have operating system specifics though. You can even bootstrap Go from it provided you have the SDK.

Incidentally 9Front is a modern fork of Plan9.

But you can see the theme here: Adding more layers of complexity to patch things. LLMs do seem to do a better job than searching forum posts! I would argue that Docker's point is to patch compatibility barriers in Linux.

They shouldn't have to. OS interfaces including commandline ones should be user oriented not bogged down by Unix dogma that was created wwhencomputerss used physical text terminals as their primary I/O device. It's not the 60s anymore and modern PC, servers, and embedded devices aren't ancient mainframes with physical terminal hardware where making everything appear to be a file and using convoluted scripting interfaces like the Unix shell made at least some sense.

> Docker tries to partially address this, right?

Docker is a good way of turning a 2kb shell script into a 400mb container. It's not a solution.

Flatpak would be a better example.

I reckon each of these has at least 3/5 of the complaints the OP has about Linux, because they're all still Unix clones.

Yep. Everyone in the OSDev community knows about it. RIP Terry.

Indeed. I am reminded of what Alan Kay has repeatedly referred to as a “pop culture” of computing that has become widespread in technical communities since the 1980s, when the spread of technology grew faster than educational efforts. One result is there are many inventions and innovations from the research community that never got adopted by major players. The corollary to “perfect is the enemy of the good” is good-enough solutions have amazingly long lifetimes in the marketplace.

There are many great ideas in operating systems, programming languages, and other systems that have been developed in the fast 30 years, but these ideas need to work with existing infrastructure due to costs, network effects, and other important factors.

What is interesting is how some of these features do get picked up by the mainstream computing ecosystem. Rust is one of the biggest breakthroughs in systems programming in decades, bringing together research in linear types and memory safety in a form that has resonated with a lot of systems programmers who tend to resist typical languages from the PL community. Some ideas from Plan 9, such as 9P, have made their way into contemporary systems. Features that were once the domain of Lisp have made their ways into contemporary programming languages, such as anonymous functions.

I think it would be cool if there were some book or blog that taught “alternate universe computing”: the ideas of research systems during the past few decades that didn’t become dominant but have very important lessons that people working on today’s systems can apply. A lot of what I know about research systems comes from graduate school, working in research environments, and reading sites like Hacker News. It would be cool if this information were more widely disseminated.

Yeah the more you read up on computing history from barely even 40 years ago, it seems that most of the things that we take for granted today became so more through politics (and in the case of Microsoft, bullying) than merit.

There was also a period of time where everyone and their mom was writing a new operating system trying to replicate Linux’ success

How else would you describe a system that isnt modelled after one that was designed in the 60s like almost all the ones in common use today are?

Your complaint is more pointless than what you're complaining about.

In an operating system course I attended it was mostly Unix and everyone was used to bashing Windows NT ("so crappy, bsod etc.") but we had Stallings' book and I was surprised to learn that NT was in many ways an improvement over Unix and Linux.

Exactamente.

Ok, even Doug Crockford has mucked around with licensing before, so this is definitely a digression and not aimed at CharlotteOS which looks fascinating:

I wish there was a social stigma in Open Source/Free Software to doing anything other than just picking a bog standard license.

I mean, we have a social stigma even for OS developers about rolling your own crypto primitives. Even though it's the same very general domain, we know from experience that someone who isn't an active, experienced cryptographer would have close to a zero percent chance of getting it right.

If that's true, then it's even less likely that a programmer is going to make legally competent (or even legally relevant) decisions when writing their own open source compatible license, or modifying an existing license.

I guess technically the "clarification" of a bog standard license is outside of my critique. Even so, their clarification is shoe-horned right there in a parenthetical next to the "License" heading, making me itchy... :)

What languages are easy to understand and maintain, anyway?

Like those sports cars where you need a fingerprint to start it and some thieves in a third world country cut off the owner's finger to steal the car.

For sure you'd have to use it from time to time.