Smallest supported OS ?

[Philip Rhoades]

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
> 
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Philip Rhoades

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