It was written for the Acorn computers that were the original use of the ARM architecture. It's still around and is pretty lean, despite being complete with a GUI and network capabilities.
Description from Wikipedia: “Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs and now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software under the MIT License. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.”
Plan 9 - one version of which is 9front, which says this:
"Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, MNT Reform, and QEMU. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.
The pi.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 1, 2, and 3. The pi3.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.
I'm not going to go into it but you can look up most of the information about this dating back 25 years. As someone who was around at the time in that community, and was in certain locations of interest at the time, its best to avoid and use the public projects like AROS etc.
If you decide you miss DOS, then you can also use the DOS emulator available on Redox-OS. It's not Linux but there are some linux-inspired stuff there, including apps from the Cosmic desktop environment. Both announced here: https://www.redox-os.org/news/release-0.9.0/
I've got a hobby OS that's currently x86 32-bit only. amd64 and arm64 are on my roadmap, but if all goes well, it's going to be the same experience on all three platforms, so arm64 won't be anymore exciting than x86 32-bit. Other than, you could run it on a raspberry pi or maybe an arm apple.
I imagine most hobby OSes are looking at arm support vs adding something else, and arm support is going to be more fiddly and have less to show for it. I haven't found much time to work on mine lately, but other things are way more important like getting my virtio-net driver and the v86 virtio-net device to work together; having networking in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=crazierl would be really neat. Running on a pi would be neat too, but a browser demo is way more accessible.
Probably not helpfully. There isn't much like this to be found in any training data. The required code would be too novel, and I predict an LLM would hallucinate a good 2/3.
Wine improvement could be aided with LLMs by monitoring the output of a windows VM running and see what exactly to display, and what exactly to have in working (not program) RAM.
Same goes for perfect OpenSource Office with MSOffice compatibility: MSOffice is running on Windows is continuously monitored for reference, showing exactly what needs to be outputted. Have this in a feedback and reinforcement loop.
TOPS on old PDP hardware (or an emulator) is quite interesting. If nothing else, it gives an appreciation for the age of many of the ideas that ended up in later OSes like CP/M and MS-DOS.
It was written for the Acorn computers that were the original use of the ARM architecture. It's still around and is pretty lean, despite being complete with a GUI and network capabilities.
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
Mezzano, a much more recent OS written in Common Lisp that runs on Arm rather than special hardware: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
Description from Wikipedia: “Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs and now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software under the MIT License. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.”
"Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, MNT Reform, and QEMU. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.
The pi.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 1, 2, and 3. The pi3.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.
QEMU images are provided in QCOW2 format."
https://9front.org/releases/
Go try it
1. Everything is a file. 2. A command does only one thing well
There's no init, fstab, etc etc etc. Very little of your Unix muscle memory will work.
0. https://www.projectoberon.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
<https://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2004-11-00063-DE.html>
I'd appreciate if you could link to something definite rather than play 20 questions over vague insinuations.
Back in the day, Tek oscilloscopes ran ST on the metal.
http://www.vm370.org/
Full S/370 assembler source included.
If you decide you miss DOS, then you can also use the DOS emulator available on Redox-OS. It's not Linux but there are some linux-inspired stuff there, including apps from the Cosmic desktop environment. Both announced here: https://www.redox-os.org/news/release-0.9.0/
and
"It should be able to run most Linux/BSD programs with minimal modifications"
Hmm weird. Will give it a try, anyway.
I imagine most hobby OSes are looking at arm support vs adding something else, and arm support is going to be more fiddly and have less to show for it. I haven't found much time to work on mine lately, but other things are way more important like getting my virtio-net driver and the v86 virtio-net device to work together; having networking in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=crazierl would be really neat. Running on a pi would be neat too, but a browser demo is way more accessible.
https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/
https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2024/
Haiku has tier-2 ports to ARM, RISC-V, and SPARC: https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status
ReactOS has an ARM32 port but the ARM64 one is not usable yet.
Skift apparently runs on ARM and RISC-V: https://skiftos.org/
Because it's not relate to the question.
Edit: Sorry they support other platforms. See next comment.
https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta5/
I wonder if letting loose a coding LLM on them with clear goals and a feedback loop, could bring them to (at least near) completion?
Same goes for perfect OpenSource Office with MSOffice compatibility: MSOffice is running on Windows is continuously monitored for reference, showing exactly what needs to be outputted. Have this in a feedback and reinforcement loop.
https://github.com/hperaza/RSX280
Nothing like DOS. Nothing like UNIX.
https://www.projectoberon.net
The evolution of Oberon based OSes,
Ethos, https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...
Active Oberon which is the Oberon variant I prefer,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Oberon https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon
Some screenshots at my article, take it while the site still exists,
https://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon§ion=co...
SPIN, done in Modula-3
https://www-spin.cs.washington.edu/external/overview.html
Singularity,
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
https://github.com/lastweek/source-singularity
Midori,
although no source code, the blog posts, existing talks and internal session at Microsof do provide some nice overview,
https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
"The Midori Operating System Overview"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37WgsoZpf3k
"Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET"
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...
"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k
Xerox PARC Mesa, used on the Xerox Star OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
https://computerhistory.org/blog/xerox-alto-source-code/
Xerox PARC Cedar, used on Dorado platforms
http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/cedar/The...
https://worrydream.com/refs/Swineheart_1986_-_A_Structural_V...
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1...
Xerox PARC Smalltalk,
original documentation can be taken from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
- Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice
- Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation
- Smalltalk-80, The Interactive Programming Environment
Squeak and Pharos linage,
https://squeak.org/
https://pharo.org/
Xerox PARC Interlisp-D, with Medley
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1056743.1056745
https://interlisp.org/
House, written in Haskell
https://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/
MirageOS, written in OCaml, partially used by Docker (TCP/IP stack), and Xen Hypervisor
https://mirage.io/
https://mirage.io/blog/2022-04-06.vpnkit
https://xenproject.org/projects/mirage-os/
AmigaOS,
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexamiga.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
https://www.amigaos.net/content/1/features
https://aros.sourceforge.io/
Solo in Concurrent Pascal,
The solo operating system: A concurrent pascal program
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb843ff4581/vb843ff45...
Lillith in Modula-2
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/eth/lilith/ETH7646_Lilith_A_Workst...
https://www.modula2.org/modula2-history.php
Now go out and explore, UNIX is not the be all, end all of how an OS is supposed to be, neither is C the ultimate systems programming language.
> HelenOS runs on eight different processor architectures
Pretty sure ARM is one of those.
Also, see below
https://distroware.gitlab.io/lists/RunsOnARM/
Nothing personal against Linux, but I'd like to see something new, like TempleOS, for example.