Norman,
On 2017-02-15 00:19, Norman Feske wrote:
Hi Philip,
thanks for your interest in Genode and welcome to the list!
Thanks for the welcome! I think it will be a very interesting investigation for me - I have been thinking about micro-kernels for a while . .
It may be a coincidence but I recently added a note about the SAFE network to our "Challenges" page:
https://genode.org/about/challenges
Really cool to see that the interest may be even mutual!
SAFE and Genode could be a beautiful and very timely marriage . .
First question - from searching the archives I can't see any info on one of things I am interested in - what is the smallest bootable OS that can be set up with Genode? - could it be small enough to fit on a floppy disk?
It ultimately depends on the system scenario.
E.g., for a very simple scenario (log.run) on NOVA, the build system generates an ISO image of 3 MiB, which contains the NOVA hypervisor, Genode's core and init components, the dynamic linker, and a simple "hello-world" component. The content on the ISO is not packed though. In principle, GRUB supports gzip'ed boot modules. If this feature was used, the image would shrink to about 800 KiB. (I just gzipped the ISO to get a rough estimate)
Pretty impressive!
For an interactive scenario, you may take os/run/demo.run as reference. It contains several drivers (VESA, PS/2, timer), the nitpicker GUI server, and a few interactive example applications. The ISO is 8 MiB (gzip'ed to 3 MiB) whereas a third of the size can be attributed to a single demo application (scout).
In short, you can squeeze a Genode-based system on a floppy. But such a system would be rather boring. ;-)
I know this exercise would not be of prime interest for the Genode development but I am thinking of emergency boot disk(s) for old hardware (no CD or USB) and it might be a convenient investigation for me to start exploring Genode - would it be possible to daisy-chain a number of floppies to boot?
Regards,
Phil.
Cheers Norman
-- Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske Genode Labs
http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org
Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
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