Breaking Out Of POSIX Thinking

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I have realized that I am spoiled by the same standards that I was so happy to see succeed. I hate to admit it, but I now get uncomfortable in the absence of glibc or dietlibc. I get even more uncomfortable in the absence of POSIX signals and NPTL. I then think back to days [...]

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The Great Microkernel Debate

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Its been some years since the great debate between Linus Torvalds (and friends) vs Andy Tanenbaum on usenet. I’ve only linked the debate itself with an encyclopedic reference, the links to the debaters more or less point to individuals as they were when the great debate happened. If you are a sci-fi fan, you’ll realize [...]

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Yes, I’m Still Alive

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Its been a while since I’ve updated this blog. I was actually tickled to get a few e-mails from readers asking me if I was still alive and well. I’m alive and kicking, the last month and a half has been extremely busy. There are some new goodies, however! Gridnix is finally launching, projects that [...]

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A better approach to distributed IPC

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There are two golden rules to follow when packaging your own OS distribution: Don’t mangle upstream code Make it work while observing rule #1 When your making a grid OS, its hard not to break those rules. Lets take for instance a scenario where you have two computers and need to live migrate a virtual [...]

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Interesting internationalization

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I’ve been having a rather enjoyable discussion with Lorenzo Bettini, the author of GNU Gengetopt and Gengen. If you are not familiar with Gengetopt, its a tool that simplifies generating the code required for programs to accept options. I talked about gengetopt a while back on this blog. The discussion surrounds support for internationalization, which [...]

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Jakub Jermar On HelenOS

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Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Jakub Jermar via e-mail regarding his motivation behind creating and advancing HelenOS, an operating system based on the from-scratch Spartan microkernel. An important disclaimer, I am a contributor to HelenOS for my own reasons. My status as a contributor did not stop me from challenging Jakub with interesting [...]

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Why I hack at new operating systems

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I have been asked several times why I prefer to work on HelenOS instead of the Linux kernel or GNU programs. The answer is simple, working on something new is more fun and I don’t like assigning my copyright to the FSF. Today I have been working on porting my brain dead shell to HelenOS, [...]

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Helen, Spartan and Sensibility

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While reading freshmeat, I stumbled across an emerging operating system named HelenOS. HelenOS (after Helen of Troy) is a new operating system based on a preemptible micro kernel (Spartan) that has some really neat features. You thought microkernels were dead? Read on. Helen boots on pretty much every major architecture (even Xen friendly!). Its being [...]

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