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The Ethos Operating System

by fractalcat on 8/14/15, 7:49 AM with 10 comments

• by ZenoArrow on 8/14/15, 12:42 PM

  I'm confused. Two things.

  1. My initial impressions is that the idea is to build an OS that breaks from the past, but then later there is a promise to port to POSIX. Doesn't that restrict some of the design decisions that could be made when starting with a clean slate?

  2. What does this offer over unikernel-based operating systems such as MirageOS, HalVM, LING, OSv, etc...? Basically seems like they already do what Ethos plans to do.

  http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Unikernels

• by zokier on 8/14/15, 10:54 AM

  This would be so much more interesting if it was actually available for download. It's sad that djb's minimallt seems to be stuck with ethos non-release. I remember them promising open source release 'soon' back in 2013 when it was initially published, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress in that direction.

  Has anyone poked the authors recently to hear what's going on?

• by TimFogarty on 8/14/15, 10:43 AM

  > Most of our programming is done in C (kernel) or Go (user space). [1]

  It's cool that Go is being used in a project like this. For some reason I found that a bit surprising.

  [1] http://www.ethos-os.org/background.html