Dwight Hughes <dwighth at ipa.net> wrote:
> Also be sure to take a close look at the Flux OSKit version 0.96 just
> released:
> 
>     http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/
> 
> You can create very small "kernels" with just the resources required and
> wrapper code from other unixy OSs.

Interesting! How portable is OSKit?

I know that Compaq is running a stripped down Linux on their Itsy
Palmtop prototype. I believe it uses about 4 MBytes, comparable the
the stripped-down FreeBSD (PicoBSD) that David Pennell mentioned.

Squeak doesn't need much from an OS: a display driver, a millisecond
clock, and a pointing device driver are the minimum; everything else
is optional including a file system and keyboard input. (Support for
some sort of interrupt key or button is quite helpful.) I know of at
least two bare-hardware Squeak ports. Writing drivers for the basic
display and pointing devices is not too difficult. Adding support for
a file system, sound output and input, and/or serial ports is also
straightforward. The one thing I would be loathe to tackle is a TCP/IP
protocol stack. So, for me, networking is the most compelling feature
that these micro OS's offer.

Unfortunately, just having a portable OS kernel may not be sufficient.
The hardware details required to port the OS to a given device
may not be published, or the existing OS may use a memory
protection scheme that that makes it impossible to supplant it
with a new OS.

Still, I'd love to see more bare-machine Squeak ports, and I'd
be happy to see Squeak ported to one of these micro OS kernels.

	-- John