Interim OS: minimalist OS influenced by Lisp machines and Plan 9

https://github.com/mntmn/interim

by pmoriarty • 8 years ago

197 64 8 years ago

github.com

jxy• 8 years ago

When you have Lisp, why do you still need a so called filesystem?

The idea of flat text files sounds odd, when you can have structured S-exp's.

monocasa2• 8 years ago

Interoperability with the rest of the planet.

vbuwivbiu2• 8 years ago

you don't need "everything is a filesystem" for that

mrighele• 8 years ago

I would say that currently interoperability with the rest of the world is better served by a network interface and a standard protocol (HTTP for example)

jj12345• 8 years ago

I'm just now starting to crack open some Lisp tutorials, coming from the OOP side of the fence, so please excuse the ignorance. For my learning purposes, would you be open to explaining how symbolic expressions would circumvent the need for a file system?

derefr2• 8 years ago

Instead of a file system (a system that consumes a block device and exposes a database mapping a hierarchy of tree-nodes with stringly-keyed names to seekable byte-buffers), picture something like Erlang’s DETS (a system that consumes a seekable byte-buffer and exposes a tuple store, where the tuples are regular in-memory objects that happen to live in an isolated heap which is memory-mapped from the file.)

Now consider that anything that consumes a seekable byte-buffer as its backing store could just-as-well be modified to consume a block device as its backing store.

Voila: your OS now has “durable memory” in place of a filesystem.

(And, in fact, in modern systems you can skip the whole block-device layer and just sit your tuple store directly on top of NVMe.)

frou_dh• 8 years ago

From the README of this specific project, it's clear that the line between where the language ends and the OS starts is blurred.

If an OS is an exclusive environment for a single language, then that language's abstractions for handling data could be pushed much deeper than we're used to.

vbuwivbiu2• 8 years ago

images

jonjacky• 8 years ago

Robert Strandh's LispOS proposal [1] has a single-level object store as an alternative to a conventional file system. See especially [2] and [3]

[1] https://github.com/robert-strandh/LispOS

[2] https://github.com/robert-strandh/LispOS/blob/master/Documen...

[3] https://github.com/robert-strandh/LispOS/blob/master/Documen...

cmrdporcupine• 8 years ago

You need some kind of global (or not-so global) persistent namespace. And ability to interoperate with the outside world. It's not a bad idea to have a separate API for managing persistent state vs ephemeral state -- or at least that's not a bad convention we've developed over the years in order to allow for some sanity in state management. Persistent image-based systems like Smalltalk tend in my experience to degrade to a confusing mess and become difficult to reason about over time unless you end up introducing concepts that start looking suspiciously like files.

gcb0• 8 years ago

you can abstract as much as you want, but at some point you will have to interact with a disk. heck most http proxies abuse the "file" concept in linux kernel as a way to get memory cache of disk data for free.

see https://varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes

a7776f88862• 8 years ago

How do you organize the s-expressions? Interlisp offered what you describe: structured storage, with "in-place" structured editing, for code and data. The unit of organization was still the file; you just had structured files (which BTW was the norm in most operating systems other than Unix). A hierarchical file system is a tree anyway (add symbolic links, and you have a graph). A lot of data storage layouts use it exactly as a data structure. Maildir is an example.

taeric• 8 years ago

Because partially structured data is essentially unstructured data. So, you ultimately need a way to store unstructured data.

pjmlp5• 8 years ago

C 88.8% Common Lisp 6.4% C++ 3.1% Assembly 0.7%

I would expect a bit more Lisp in an OS that is supposed to be inspired by Lisp Machines.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

95% of C code is comment teasing Greenspun

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

Lisp is just such a powerfully concentrated language that it's doing 85% of the work even though it's just 6.3% of the mass. ;)

It's like Dr. Bronner's soap: Dilute! Dilute!

rudolfwinestock• 8 years ago

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10222934

mntmn• 8 years ago

Interim author here. Surprised to see this reappear. I'm a bit embarrassed by the code quality nowadays, but I still like the concept and as critics here have correctly pointed out, there ought to be a lot less C in it.

Back then I was struggling very hard to get the low level details of the machine under control (Pi back then and some experiments with x86 BIOS stuff). It was super fun to have this ham-fisted brutalist JIT actually do something real and to connect to IRC on this mockery of a TCP stack and to make some VC4 GL triangles appear out of a bunch of commandstream arrays.

In the meantime I've built an FPGA graphics card for Amiga (VA2000) and an open laptop, the MNT Reform, whose beta units will ship very soon now (TM). A while ago I also worked with some really smart software engineers as a startup CTO for 1.5 years and all of these things together have given me a lot more perspective and depth compared to back then.

It will be fun to return to this and clean it up as a demo for Reform.

dman• 8 years ago

The fact that you are embarassed is a sure sign that you have grown tremendously as an engineer. Kudos for working on such interesting things.

wanderfowl• 8 years ago

This is a stellar comment, I've always found that a person's level of (dis)comfort with their past work is a great judge of how willing they are to learn and improve.

dkersten2• 8 years ago

I've built an FPGA graphics card for Amiga (VA2000)

That sounds pretty interesting! Every so often I think about the things I don’t enjoy when using computers and how I’d solve it (I’ve played around with hobbyist kernel/is development on occasion too, including contributing to Daeken’s RenrakuOS ten years ago..) but my motivation always drains when I think about how it would never be realistic to get hardware accelerated graphics working. Just the other day I was thinking that maybe my best bet is a minimal Linux system that boots into a full screen OpenGL application that basically pretends to be my OS. I even thought about doing it on a RPi3 since I have a few of them sitting around and it seems like a nice self-contained, expandable and cheap hardware platform to build on. Your projects sound like some of the things I’ve dreamed about but never actually did. :)

daeken2• 8 years ago

Didn't expect to see RenrakuOS mentioned in this thread -- hey man! I actually started playing around with some ideas for a modern follow-up recently, stealing a lot of concepts from Redox. Maybe once it gets off the ground, I can rope you into working on that OS too, haha. (For those who are curious, RenrakuOS was a pure-managed (.NET) operating system from the late 2000s: https://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS It could run on top of a desktop .NET framework, or compile to native code and run bare metal, even including some basic networking support and such. Ended up dying mostly due to me getting too busy with startup stuff, but also it had a lot of poor design decisions, e.g. a broken process abstraction.)

xelxebar• 8 years ago

Whoa. That MNT Reform looks absolutely sick!! It's basically my dream machine. I periodically look around for exactly this kind of thing and can't believe I've not stumbled upon it before.

Need to start saving up now for when it goes live. Hopefully, my puny student wages can handle the cost.

Anyway, just wanted to express my enthusiasm for your project!!

newacctjhro2• 8 years ago

Hey, does MNT Reform run coreboot?

nanomonkey• 8 years ago

The documentation specifies the Raspberry Pi 2. Are there problems getting this to load on other version? I have a RPi 1 and a 3.

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

Reminds me of this legendary but true story about Lisp Machine hacking I posted a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879364

Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":

There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.

It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).

He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!

Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:

ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/mailing-lists/slug/900531/msg00339.html

Also eudox posted this link:

Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:

http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples....

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

Devon had a great (but dated) idea for a company called "Rent-A-RAM" that had vans full of RAM which would drive around late at night, plugging into Lisp machines while their programmers were sleeping, paging in all their memory, garbage collecting, and paging it back to disk.

equalunique• 8 years ago

On the topic of the Symbolics machines, there is a group-buy running until October 26 for Cherry-compatible keycaps inspired by the look and feel of the Space Cadet keyboard for the Symbolics Lisp Machine. A Novelty keycaps set even includes "LMI" and "Symbolics" logo keycaps: https://kono.store/collections/all-products-list/products/sa...

Interim OS: minimalist OS influenced by Lisp machines and Plan 9

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