Re: About BSD
On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 03:44:33AM -0700, *NONE* wrote: Hi, I was just wondering how did you make BSD, how many people did it take you, and how long it took to make? I want to see if I and a team of programmers has what its got to make an OS one day. FreeBSD 1.0 was released in 1993. That was based on the older BSD-releases. BSD 1.0 was released in 1977, which in turn built on the early Unix-releases the first of which appeared in 1971. So it took several hundreds of people working on and off for about three decades to get FreeBSD to its present state. It wouldn't take that long if one started today since nowadays there are better tools, better hardware, and a lot more knowledge about what works and what does not work. Writing a *simple* OS can easily be done by a handful of people working for a few months. Creating a complete OS like modern FreeBSD releases or Linux distributions or recent Windows-versions requires many man-years worth of work. Not because it is all that difficult (although some parts can be) but simply because there are so many things that need to be done. (Creating device-drivers for a gazillion different, poorly documented, hardware devices is not the least of the problems.) -- Insert your favourite quote here. Erik Trulsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: About BSD
*NONE* wrote: Hi, I was just wondering how did you make BSD, how many people did it take you, and how long it took to make? I want to see if I and a team of programmers has what its got to make an OS one day. Thanks Tom - Do you Yahoo!? vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today! ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For the history see: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/history.html As for the people: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributors/index.html BTW thanks to all of you and to the ones not mentiond there: You are doing a great job! Michael ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: About BSD
*NONE* [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi, I was just wondering how did you make BSD, how many people did it take you, and how long it took to make? I want to see if I and a team of programmers has what its got to make an OS one day. Not that I have a good answer to that one, but it might be that you find the Can One Person Write a Kernel? part of this article by Andrew Tanenbaum interesting: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/ ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
BSD and L4 (was: Re: About BSD)
On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 03:44:33AM -0700, *NONE* wrote: Hi, I was just wondering how did you make BSD, how many people did it take you, and how long it took to make? I want to see if I and a team of programmers has what its got to make an OS one day. Thanks Tom It took decades for FreeBSD (or Linux) to get where they are now. However, if all you need is a small embedded OS, you can start with a decent microkernel and build a tiny subset of userland servers for memory manamgent, device drivers, filesystems, etc... L4Ka::Pistachio is a very good, state-of-the-art microkernel that you may want to use as a foundation for your own OS: http://l4ka.org/projects/pistachio/ Of course, you can reuse as much FreeBSD source code as you like. It can save you or your team years of development (both coding AND testing)! One (common?) approach is to take something like NetBSD, and write a new port against Pistachio, as if Pistachio were a new arch. The (hypothetical) NetBSD/L4 would be a userland server running on top of Pistachio instead of the raw hardware. Regular processes would require (via IPC calls) services from the OS personality server. Once you have this up and running (it has been done before with BSD 4.4Lite and Mach, see: Lites, but do avoid Mach because it's not as efficient IPC-wise as L4), you can always split up the big monolithic NetBSD/L4 program into separate modules, which would all invoke each other through ultra fast IPCs provided by L4 uKernel. Of course, it's a lot of work. But the nice thing about it, is that you can add components as the need arises, yet still have a running system after you've laid down the foundations. Good luck and happy hacking! Cheers, cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
