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!
Since I left the GGL back in January and moved down to Washington DC to my new job I still feel this urge for working on a project, even on the side, that gives back to gaming and, just maybe, helps gaming grow in some way.
So I’ve been tinkering with some ideas I’ve had recently, some old but most are new. I’ve taken that opportunity to start using new technologies (to me). I’ve been a LAMP (and FAMP) guy for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at PostgreSQL in the past but wrote it off and never really gave it a chance until now. I’m just getting started but it’s pretty interesting so far… consistency, stability and correctness have never been so nice — even if it means I need to (re-)learn a few things about databases
I’m also fooling with a new framework more and more, Yii. The design fits my requirements pretty well, but more on that as I need to tinker more to make a proper post about it.
Ah this brings back some memories of my venture through Yellowstone 2 years ago with Kate..