Re: [Pillaros-design] intro

[Mike O'M. <pil...@gm...>]

Hi Vitor,

  You'd think that someone who's as used to using computers as myself
would not make a silly mistake like closing the Firefox tab which
contained the response to this email that I had been crafting for an
hour, but alas....

>  My name is Vitor, and I work with IP telephony here in Brazil (I
> know, far away from the civilization ;)).

That's great, you'll be a great asset to the project.

>=20
>   For licensing, I would vote for BSD, but I don't really care, along
> it's still a open source license.

I'm sorry for my brevity here, I had a lot more in my mistakenly lost
email. But basically I like the BSD license, but I don't like the idea
of someone being able to incorporate our OS in a proprietary product.
I feel that the GPL is too restrictive however, and so I will probably
either go with an academic license (BSD, MIT, or AFL -- which is more
of an actual license, written by a lawyer and such), or the OSL which
is more restrictive than the BSD license in that it requires that
derivative works are licensed under the OSL as well (not sure that I
like that though, I don't particularly care what license they license
it under as long as its OSI-approved.)

>=20
>  About scheduling, do you made already any initial consideration?

None except for the fact that something as simple as straight-up round
robin will not serve our needs.

>  And what flaws you mean when you talk about the Unix concept?
>=20
Again, I had so much more on this... Basically I'd like to make the
kernel user-aware. instead of having a program like login do the
authentication work. I'd like to [completely] eliminate the need for
suid-root programs. I'd also like to create a file system designed
from a usability point-of-view. I'd like to create an fs that allows
for such things as groups of groups, and a much more expanded
permission system than the traditional ugo,rwx. I would also like to
create the system so that a user gets his own virtual 'world' when he
logs in, he cannot see anything that he doesn't have permission to.
Regular system tools like ls, cd, etc. would be stored on his personal
copy of a virtual 'system' partition r-x only. There would be a 'root'
user, but in a way it would be more like 'bob' logs in and then
becomes root, sort of like the cisco 'enable' command. There would be
other administration levels however. For example, 'Jim' could have the
'apache-admin' bit set, and therefore he could see and administer the
apache config files. I could go on about this for hours though, we can
discuss it more later, or in a dedicated thread.

>  Sorry for the bad english,

You're english is fine :)


>=20
> Vitor Py.
> Fluminense Federal University.
>=20
> On 8/1/05, Mike O'Malley <pil...@gm...> wrote:
> > This is the first email that is going out to this list. There are only
> > a few members at this point, but I'd like to introduce myself and go
> > over the general ideas that I have about PilOS thus far.
> >
> > My name is Mike O'Malley, I'm an open source consultant, and I've
> > decided to write an operating system designed specifically for use as
> > a VoIP router (as Linus said "Just for fun"). The topic of this list
> > is to identify and discuss design topics of the OS. I will be in need
> > of developers in the future, but for now, we're still in the planning
> > phase.
> >
> > The general idea that I have thus far is a totally new OS from the
> > ground up. The OS will probably be licensed under the OSL or the AFL,
> > but this is something that I would like some input and help deciding
> > on as well. The hardware is amd64, my choice in that matter is based
> > largely on the improvements that AMD and the x86-64 platform made to
> > the x86 platform, as well as price, availability, and performance. The
> > scheduler is a major question at this point, there should be much
> > discussion on the benefits and down-sides of our many choices before a
> > decision is made; we will need something that can ensure that voice
> > packets are switched as a priority, QoS, etc. I'm looking to include
> > this functionality in the kernel i.e. giving the VoIP layer benefits
> > similar to 'kernel-mode' Linux. I have some general design concepts
> > for file system, memory management, and higher-level user interaction
> > as well, and I would like to discuss all of these things on this list.
> >
> > As an aside, I decided to write an OS from scratch as opposed to using
> > and modifying one of the *BSDs or Linux not because I don't like them,
> > but rather because I see some design flaws in the Unix concept and it
> > is my goal to fix some of them. I love Unix and Linux, but I think
> > that this is an opportunity to create something that doesn't suffer
> > from some of the downfalls of a 40 year old operating system design;
> > creating a more security-aware kernel for instance. Anyway, I'm
> > getting ahead of myself...
> >
> > So, in conclusion, we have a lot to talk about, please ask questions
> > and post any thoughts or feelings about anything one way or another. I
> > look forward to hearing from you.
> >
> > --
> > Mike O'Malley Jr.
> > President
> > Pillar Open Source Technologies, LLC.
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------
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> >
>=20


--=20
Mike O'Malley Jr.
President
Pillar Open Source Technologies, LLC.