I made a build VPS box to do some custom builds using gcc4 only, as previously mentioned, but I still haven’t broken the 100MB barrier yet. The 78MB build I did failed to boot, and I’m switching from making ISOs to VMWare as I can’t stand making any more coasters!
From what I can tell the kernel core is around 1.8MB in total plus some required libraries, so I think it’s possible to get the minimum install well under 100MB. (kernel, app server, input server, tracker?)
The goals I’ve set for my education/knowledge of this very fine OS are:
1.) To see how low I can get a minimal install to boot - even if there are no applications
2.) Develop a framework for application + system updates - I have a basic implementation on paper, now I just need to implement it and see how much of the existing build system needs to be tweaked
3.) Understand the internals better as it’s been a while since I’ve done any OS tinkering
I think 1 is gonna be easy to do this week, #2 will be a good tinkering test but #3 is already forcing me to break open my old OS design books and relearn some things.
Haiku OS, a hobby OS that I’ve been watching for over 8 years released their first Alpha last week. In between work, wife stuff and being sick I found some time to tinker with it on a variety of hardware:
- Pentium II 233Mhz w/ 128MB Memory
- AMD 3200XP w/ 768MB Memory
- Pentium 4 2.0Ghz w/ 768MB Memory
- Thinkpad X61 (Pentium T7300 @ 2Ghz) w/ 2.0GB Memory
I installed BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 on the first 3 systems and compared it to Haiku OS Alpha 1 and found the performance to be a little less on Haiku’s part, but I believe that is due to debugging being enabled in the release and usage of gcc 2.0. I installed a few applications and found everything to be working, but having a FireFox 2.0 port shipped with the Alpha was just perfect. I could almost use the OS as-is, if they would get Flash working of course 
I’ve gotten so taken by Haiku (BeOS) again, that I started tinkering. I setup a build system today and started compiling a few images using gcc4 only and found it felt more responsive. That could just be me on one system, but either way I think I now have something I can tinker with. Haiku’s goal is to be BeOS 5.0 compatable with R1 and that will only be a gcc2+gcc4 hybrid release so it will be some time until they are solely focused on gcc4 (or whatever compiler they go with for R2+) so I’m pretty much on my own making my own personal ‘distro’. I’m really curious about application distribution + installation theory. Plus I want to see how small I can get the base OS. So far I have a 78MB install but that’s with a bunch of stuff still enabled. With how well this is designed and coded, I bet I could get it to run in under 32MB memory and 50MB HD…. ah something to shoot for. I haven’t been this excited about alt OS stuff in a while!