I'm new to the list, but I've found some references to 'bare-metal' Squeak
implementations.  Is anyone working on this?  

What would be the ideal kind of kernel to run Squeak on top of?  I know
portability would be on the top of the list.  How about single vs.
multithreaded? Maybe even something completely different to take advantage
of the unique needs of a smalltalk environment?  

I assume that a goal would be to eventually make Squeak classes that could
generate the low-level kernel code for a given platform, much like the
interpreter generator.  Then, to port to another platform you would simply
define the characteristics of that specific platform.  All from within
Squeak.  That would be.... nice.

I don't have much experience with Smalltalk, and even less with OS design.
But it seems that one way to approach this would be to build something
quickly using simple, existing tools.  Then, when there is a working system
we could factor parts of the original low-level code out and replace them
with code generated by Squeak.  At that point, we could make refinements in
speed, portability, etc. from within Squeak itself. 

Specifically, I've started looking at FreeDOS's kernel, dos-c, as a
possible starting point.  There is already a DOS port of Squeak out there,
and it seems as if it would not be too terribly complicated to take dos-c
and the DOS port of Squeak and kinda mash them together to make a booting
SqueakOS.  Plus, the dos-c kernel is supposed to be pretty portable, and is
written mostly in C so it shouldn't be not TOO hard to work with.  It
should also be simpler than a more advanced kernel.  And, it's GPL'd.  

I've just started looking at dos-c, I'm reading the author's book now.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the current version of dos-c will
handle the DPMI stuff that the DOS port of Squeak needs, but maybe that
would be easy to fix for someone who knows what they are doing?

Any suggestions?  

Jerry Bell
jdbell at fareselaw.com

Links:

http://www.iop.com/~patv/ - this is the dos-c site.  
http://www.freedos.org/   - freeDOS, freely available DOS clone. Dos-c is
the kernel.

Book:
FreeDOS Kernel / Pat Villani , it's available at Amazon.  I'm reading it
now and starting to look at the source.