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.
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)[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...
The numbers are not for through latency (-> audio interface -> cpu -> audio interface ->)
Instead they are for "half-duplex" latency (-> audio interface -> cpu OR cpu -> audio interface ->).
The 48kHz number represents a buffer size of 32 samples, which is entirely possible with Linux and macOS. The note also does not indicate how h/w specific these numbers are: there can be many h/w level issues with very low latency numbers that can't be solved by the OS (a classic example is a wifi chipset or video interface hogging the PCI bus for too long). On the "right" h/w, 32 samples for input latency is not really that remarkable.
What would be remarkable is if MenuetOS can get this performance from arbitrary intel hardware.
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)
"decompilation prohibited" - but I thought it's written in assembly?
Which means it's not compiled?
...and on a somewhat related tangent, look at how many appliances have a "do not open/no user-serviceable parts inside" warning.
Assembly language is still a textual, human-friendly language where you can give memory locations symbolic names, you use mnemonics for the different machine instructions, many assemblers have various forms of macro support, etc. That all gets "assembled" or "compiled" into the machine code.
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.
The cloud OSes have long left classical UNIX behind, Kubernetes or managed languages on top of type 1 hypervisors are the name of the game, even if there is some POSIX based kernel somewhere on the stack.
On the mobile side, although Android and iOS have some POSIX support, it hardly matters for app development.
Even on macOS, which is a certified UNIX, if you want access to some of the modern networking APIs, they are only exposed at Objective-C level.
So while POSIX kind of has won, long term it has been yet another phase in the history of computing, thus looking forward to such alternatives.
Of course I know that MenuetOS fitting in a floppy is more a challenge for the author than something we should aim for for regular software. But still, I sometimes calculate in my mind "how much MenuetOS floppies is this" when I download and use some basic app written in Electron. Even a lot of websites are heavier than that.
I think MenuetOS and a modern app are two extremes and I say to myself that we should aim for some just middle.
Based.
That may be true in the datacentre and the cloud.
The project kept growing a bit, very slowly. Seems like after v1.00 the author lost most interest. So if it is still a prototype work without any commercial usage, it would be great to have it published with source code.
Not sure if it becomes "legal" to breach the GPL if original authors die though.
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.
https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/d4f9b980f18fc6722b06...
It absolutely does free OS designers to remove the POSIX parts from in between, but no one really has yet
You're not shadowbanned btw.
Android and ChromeOS developers also don't have any access to any kind of POSIX abstractions or APIs.
But something like this lives in the hobbyist space where (I think) bare metal is still king.