J
> One of the achievements of the Interval SqueakOS was to allow device
> drivers to be written in Squeak. That's a pretty fancy trick, and they
> pulled it off.
Just barely, and I'm pretty much convinced it isn't really worth it. At
least, not unless one can fairly seriously rejig things to provide
useful OS type facilities like protection of one application's mmory
from another, all that stuff.

>
> So, it's really quite easy to get Squeak running on bare hardware.
> 
> But...
> 
> Once you've done it you realize that there is a lot of hardware out there,
> like wireless cards, cameras, drives, etc. Hardware specs for these
> devices are often unavailable to developers because the vendors typically
> supply their own device drivers for the standard OS's. So even if you
> have the time to write your own device drivers, you may lack the
> necessary documentation.
Exactly. Not to mention that writing a tcp/ip stack is a bit of a
labour. Why not use one that has already been written and tested? That's
why I tend to think that using the OSKit is a good idea. It allows use
of linux device drivers and so on. Big savings in effort. SqueakNOS is
an excellent project using this approach.

I agree with Dan's old aphorism about the OS but I think a better
interpretation of it is that nothing in the OS should be unreachable
from your language - not that there shouldn't be the OS there at all.


-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: PHP: Put Hackers into Privileged mode