Video of it booting

Monkuous's port of Linux to my fantasy computer w/ a custom RISC architecture now gets to a bash prompt. Feels weird I can no longer modify my boot ROM without having to worry about keeping backwards compatibility with... Linux

soooo it's been a while since i posted but apparently my custom RISC architecture runs the whole ass linux kernel now (courtesy of monkuous who has done all the porting work)

i wonder how people survived in college in the 90s back when they only had ChatMBR

made a family tree (family DAG?) of a bunch of weird DEC operating systems based on like thousands of pages of weird papers i've read through including a bunch of stuff that i had to get digitized by the computer history museum

That yacine guy in particular struck me as this a long time ago but I think he was merely a trailblazer for like dozens of them

I should post here more, I'll start by posting what I'm working on!!!

I'm writing an OS called mintia2. It's written in a new language called Jackal using a fully custom self-hosted development toolchain, it's portable, and it has paging and preemptive multitasking.

github.com/xrarch/mintia2

The bit-aligned instruction encodings didn't even save any space compared to VAX machine code and the performance was also GLACIAL
archive.org/details/Perf...

Visual difference between RISCy and CISCy encoding in a hex editor view of the mintia kernel binary for XR (my RISC ISA; top) and fox32 (@ryfoxbread's CISC ISA; bottom). You can kinda see the 4 byte aligned boundaries in the RISC code and lack thereof in the CISC code

I had to use the actual ARC firmware sources and back-port them from 64-bit MIPS R4000 to 32-bit MIPS R3000. This was huge asspain bc I had to write my own TLB miss handler since the one in the existing firmware assumed the existence of "huge pages" which the R3000 didn't have support for

The coolest thing about this build is that it was a demo of "WOW" which was their technology for running 16-bit Windows programs on RISC NT. The program they demoed was Reversi, with square pieces because circles were still stubbed out in GDI:

Last year the earliest known build of Windows NT, the April '91 build, was randomly uploaded by Jeff Parsons on GitHub. It only ran on an internal MIPS R3000 dev board at Microsoft, but I managed to get it to run by porting some firmware and doing a custom machine in MAME:

Me when I strike you dead with my evil eyes

Weird fucking bots on here already lol

New from twitter: the "whiny idiot" crowd has endorsed LLMs. Truly convincing stuff

In my last kernel wanted to preserve async IO support for the tty and I was convinced I could make that generic across ptys and pipes, but I didn't have a good idea for *how*. I ended up pulling it off but it was horrifying!! The modularity of STREAMS seems like a better direction

Been reading about STREAMS from UNIX SVr4 while trying to find a good way to do character IO in my kernel. Found tons of pure hatred toward it from the 90s, but I think that was centered around some goofy user-facing APIs, bc the essence of the internal structure seems rly nice:

My hobby kernel crashing harder than a thing that crashes a lot