from Hacker News

MenuetOS

by je_bailey on 5/6/22, 11:54 PM with 53 comments

  • by Sirened on 5/7/22, 3:26 AM

    Always love hobby operating systems which leave UNIX and POSIX behind. It's really a shame that we're slowly converging on POSIX being the basis of _all_ operating systems since it forces some bizarre and undesirable design decisions [1]. Dropping POSIX and building something new gives us a chance to actually explore novel ideas in operating systems design.

    [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...

  • by atgs on 5/7/22, 2:16 AM

    I have really fond memories of playing with this sometime around 2005.

    I would download as many ISOs as I could get my hands on during the week at one parent’s house (where we had the better PC and broadband) and then at the weekend staying with the other parent I would try out all kinds of linux distros and hobby OSes.

    Menuet was incredible to me at the time, it was fast as hell. I played with it for hours and probably would have stuck with it over the crappy Win ‘95 install if not for the fact it basically didn’t have any useful software at the time. It was great fun to tinker with and explore though.

    I’ve come across it every few years since and I’m always happy to see it still worked on.

  • by cmeacham98 on 5/7/22, 5:43 AM

    The author seems to be violating the GPL with Menuet64? Menuet64 is pretty clearly a derivative work of Menuet32, which is GPL. However, Menuet64 is released under a non-free license.

    Originally I believed the author may be the sole author of Menuet32, and thus could relicense to whatever they wanted. However, the release notes (https://www.menuetos.net/relnotes.htm) credit many other authors with their contributions.

  • by upbeatlinux on 5/7/22, 2:15 AM

    It blows my mind (in a good way) that people are still posting this to Hacker news. I remember writing code for MenuetOS in both my Operating Systems and Hardware classes in ~2002. Love it!

  • by Klonoar on 5/7/22, 1:09 AM

    There's a fork of this as well, though I don't know much about why the fork happened or anything:

    http://kolibrios.org/en/

  • by nick__m on 5/7/22, 3:23 AM

    The reported audio latency, in the release note, is incredible:

      05.05.2022  1.42.20  Below millisecond audio latency (intelhda,audio.asm)
                     - 0.083 msec @ 192 khz, 24 bit (playback)
                     - 0.667 msec @ 48 khz, 16 bit (record)

  • by dang on 5/7/22, 4:36 AM

    Related:

    MenuetOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988778 - Oct 2021 (15 comments)

    Menuet – A pre-emptive, real-time and multiprocessor OS written in assembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427848 - Oct 2017 (71 comments)

    MenuetOS 1.0 – 1.5 MB OS written entirely in assembly [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9595507 - May 2015 (24 comments)

    MenuetOS, an operating system written in assembly, hits 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549808 - May 2015 (2 comments)

    MenuetOS 0.85C released: an OS written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309696 - Sept 2013 (15 comments)

    MenuetOS - An OS written entirely in assembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494999 - July 2010 (26 comments)

    MenuetOS: an OS that fits on a floppy, written entirely in assembly, has GUI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477868 - July 2010 (8 comments)

    MenuetOS: Written in Assembly, fits on a floppy, has GUI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776381 - Aug 2009 (45 comments)

  • by idiocrat on 5/7/22, 4:51 AM

  • by braingenious on 5/7/22, 1:49 AM

    This is so incredible. I would love to know if they’ve sold many commercial licenses, and what a typical commercial licensee use case would look like.

  • by blondin on 5/7/22, 12:33 AM

    by the creator of flat assembler[1] or community, if i am not mistaken. not an assembly programmer, but the syntax of flat assembler looks clean and nice.

    [1]: http://flatassembler.net

  • by indigodaddy on 5/7/22, 2:01 AM

    Not really any current processors in the tested hardware list on the site. Would we expect it to work on current Intel/AMD architectures?

  • by afr0ck on 5/7/22, 1:13 AM

    That's a very cool project for tinkering. It's a small niche, especially that it's written in assembly, it limits the scope of the things one can play with. But nevertheless, it's a very enriching experience as well as a very unusual one.

  • by obituary_latte on 5/7/22, 2:34 AM

  • by jotm on 5/7/22, 6:15 AM

    When I first stumbled upon it in the very early 00's people were hyped about it fitting on a floppy (the "save" icon :P). Pretty amazing even today.

  • by tpoacher on 5/7/22, 10:18 AM

    Has anyone here used this as their main OS (or at least made some reasonable use of it rather than simply "install to check it out")?

    I'm always curious to install and try out such "alternative" OSes, but usually the novelty wears off quite quickly, as the bar to using it for anything nontrivial is usually too high to justify the time investment.

  • by peterburkimsher on 5/7/22, 4:47 AM

    The licence doesn't make sense to me.

    "decompilation prohibited" - but I thought it's written in assembly?

    Which means it's not compiled?

  • by blacksoil on 5/7/22, 1:12 AM

    From their website: "written fully in assembly language (64bit and 32bit)." Whoa..

  • by digisign on 5/7/22, 1:55 AM

    Thought that something like this would be good as a pre-boot environment. A lot smaller than EFI and perhaps more functional. Though debatable how good an idea that is. Guessing most folks don't want to program asm however.

  • by ta988 on 5/7/22, 2:58 AM

    Oh I'm so glad to see them still alive. I learned a lot with that project close to two decades ago.

  • by frozenport on 5/7/22, 1:07 AM

    Decades