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BootOS: Monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code (github.com/nanochess)
87 points by a_imho on Aug 30, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments


There is a fascinating story behind this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438



Cool link. I like your notes, I learned some stuff about the Toledo's and generating IDs for use in IMGUIs too


Those aren't my notes, but someone elses.



I don't quite like an operating system as minimal as this to be licensed under a non-copyleft license. Operating systems like Minix have already been exploited by Intel for their Management Engine, which some call a 'backdoor' in their machines. And Minix was licensed under the BSD License as well, so Intel could get away not releasing the source code for IME easily.


This is a terribly impressive project for fitting in 512 bytes. It's charmingly packed full of features for its size and it taught me a couple x86 tricks. So I don't mean to sound harsh here. But it's an OS for the 16 bit IBM PC. Its strategic value to Intel in the FLOSS wars is probably only slightly greater than CP/M's.


With this project being so small.. impressively of course. Does this licencing type interfere if someone can separately come up with some similar methods and processes, legitimately without referring to this project.

If it was the be enforced, it seems it would be extremely hard to enforce given the limited methods such an os And features COULD be implemented within such a small space.. Or have I misunderstood completely.

As an analogy.. Being able to license the most efficient way electrons and protons can vibrate at a certain frequency seems unenforceable..


I would love a libc that allowed me to compile C programs to run as a bootloader... in the 90's. These days, I'd just hack grub.


[flagged]


For something to be considered clickbait it generally needs to be significantly deceptive.


Well, it’s own doc says the OS occupies 2 sectors, IOW > 512 bytes. Doing all those system calls in less than 1K is still impressive though.


Says 512 bytes of machine code, not "fits in the MBR". You can only cram 355 or so bytes of code into MBR area designated for that.


If you're fine with overwriting the partition table, you can go up to 510 bytes of code, followed by 2 bytes for the mandatory MBR boot signature


No partition table on floppy disks.




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