trion-kernel-dev

[Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[<chr...@ew...>]

Hi.
I am Christopher Bertels, 19 years old, from Germany. I came across your project
while looking for a c++-based Kernel project.
I'm still new to OS-Development but i've bought myself a book, coded a little
myself and am willing to help out if i can. That is of course, if trion is still
an active project. I am asking, because it doesnt seem so (the website/forums
seem quite empty...).
I have experience in:

- PHP & MySQL (several years, i started programming with php back in 2001 i think)
- C++ (about 1-2 years effectively. started coding with it before but didnt
really do something serious in that time. i have worked on some network related
stuff like a open source server emulator for a german massive multiplayer online
game)
- C# (started coding some gui-related programms in the beginning of this year)
- I also am quite experienced in Photoshop, i've done several webdesigns and
other graphical stuff for printing etc...

The reason for looking for a c++-based kernel project was that i have more
experience in object oriented programming than procedural programming like with
c and that most OS'es dont use c++ as their main language for a kernel.
on the other side i took a look at your code and found it very clean and easy to
read, which also made me even more interestend in your project.
lastly, i think it's always more fun and better for learning when working in a team.
i also liked the design document for the kernel.

so my question is: is trion still being developed and if yes, could i help out
in programming? i will continue reading my book on os design and i'd like to
help out wherever i can, even if it's the more easy stuff. :)

I'm waiting for an answer!

Greetings,
Christopher. (My nickname is: bakkdoor).

PS: I also have ICQ, if needed: 76556283, and i regularly hang around on
irc.freenode.net #osdev (among other channels). oh and i looked into the #trion
channel, but it seemed like i was the only one there... 

--
Powered by EWE TEL

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Stephen M. W. <ste...@br...>]

chr...@ew... wrote:
> I'm still new to OS-Development but i've bought myself a book, coded a little
> myself and am willing to help out if i can. That is of course, if trion is still
> an active project. I am asking, because it doesnt seem so (the website/forums
> seem quite empty...).

Heh, yeah, the project is sort of dozing off and on.  Most of the 
current work on v0.2 was done by Daniel Raffler in a brief flurry of 
work a few months ago.

We're always interested in more people willing to do work.  We'd be 
happy to have you contribute as much as you want.  The best place to 
start is to build the kernel from source, create yourself a floppy or CD 
and boot your own computer, just to get the hang of it.  You can also 
boot the kernel using bochs or, I hear, vmware.  Use the v0.2 branch in CVS.

I think the next major task in the kernel is to work the scheduler and 
dispatcher.

Since you know PHP, you could also work on the website -- I was trying 
to set stuff up only because everyone else seems to have disappeared, 
but I'm not a web developer so I could really use some help.  For a 
start, I need someone who knows PHP to write a module that will write 
mail message out to a file so they can be sent by a cron job (since the 
sourceforge web servers cannot send mail, but the sourceforge shell 
servers can).  I'm also looking for someone who can integrate the wiki, 
forums, and static web pages better.

Email me your sourceforge ID and I can add you as a project developer.

--
Stephen M. Webb
ste...@br...

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Sergey K. <tr...@de...>]

Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> chr...@ew... wrote:
>   
>> I'm still new to OS-Development but i've bought myself a book, coded a little
>> myself and am willing to help out if i can. That is of course, if trion is still
>> an active project. I am asking, because it doesnt seem so (the website/forums
>> seem quite empty...).
>>     
>
>
> Since you know PHP, you could also work on the website -- I was trying 
> to set stuff up only because everyone else seems to have disappeared, 
> but I'm not a web developer so I could really use some help.  For a 
> start, I need someone who knows PHP to write a module that will write 
>   
Stephen,

If you will share the idea what you want to have on the web-site I can
develop it on RubyOnRails.

PS and disclaimer: I am programmer, not web-designer so I need someone
who can make a design and I will implement functionality. :)

PPS: I will probably have some time soon, and I want to play with
TrionOS one more time. I like the idea and it would be nice to implement
some ideas I shared here two years ago (universal byte-code and so on) =)

All the Best!
Sergey.

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Stephen M. W. <ste...@br...>]

Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
> 
> If you will share the idea what you want to have on the web-site I can
> develop it on RubyOnRails.

I really have no idea what I want on the website other than have it not 
be so dead.  I tried setting up forums, I tried setting up a wiki.  It 
would be nice to have both those functions available from a front page 
that display the latest news, provides links to the SourceForge project 
and download pages, has a unified user/login database, and has 
consistent theming.

Wouter (dr1982) was originally doing all the website stuff, and Mikey 
(shyfx) was volunteering stuff, but they seem to have ridden into the 
sunset.  If anyone else has ideas for the website, let's discuss them 
and implement them.

> PPS: I will probably have some time soon, and I want to play with
> TrionOS one more time. I like the idea and it would be nice to implement
> some ideas I shared here two years ago (universal byte-code and so on) =)

Great.  I still think in the coming era of multicore hardware a new OS 
will rise up.  It may as well be Trion.

--
Stephen M. Webb
ste...@br...

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Sergey K. <tr...@de...>]

Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
>   
>> If you will share the idea what you want to have on the web-site I can
>> develop it on RubyOnRails.
>>     
>
> I really have no idea what I want on the website other than have it not 
> be so dead.  I tried setting up forums, I tried setting up a wiki.  It 
> would be nice to have both those functions available from a front page 
> that display the latest news, provides links to the SourceForge project 
> and download pages, has a unified user/login database, and has 
> consistent theming.
>
> Wouter (dr1982) was originally doing all the website stuff, and Mikey 
> (shyfx) was volunteering stuff, but they seem to have ridden into the 
> sunset.  If anyone else has ideas for the website, let's discuss them 
> and implement them.
>
>   
What if we will make some brain storm here ( I love brainstorming ) what
do we need on the web-site,
and later make the voting on the topics and will assign priorities on
each feature.

When we will agree what features nd information we need there, it will
be way easier to implement it.
Later we will need some kind of bug tracker and so on, so on, so on.

>> PPS: I will probably have some time soon, and I want to play with
>> TrionOS one more time. I like the idea and it would be nice to implement
>> some ideas I shared here two years ago (universal byte-code and so on) =)
>>     
>
> Great.  I still think in the coming era of multicore hardware a new OS 
> will rise up.  It may as well be Trion

That's the idea. I still think that it nice to revive the Sun's idea
"computer is a net, and net is a computer". :)

PS: I feel that in the future we will have big computer clusters who
will do the main work, and we will have lots of embedded
thin clients with plenty of bandwidth and cheap not powerful CPUs (
probably as a part of powerful GPU)  :) so all calculations
will be offloaded to that CPU clusters, and pre-cooked data will flow as
compined video-sound stream to the thin clients.



All the Best!
Sergey.

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Stephen M. W. <ste...@br...>]

Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
> What if we will make some brain storm here ( I love brainstorming ) what
> do we need on the web-site,
> and later make the voting on the topics and will assign priorities on
> each feature.
> 
> When we will agree what features nd information we need there, it will
> be way easier to implement it.
> Later we will need some kind of bug tracker and so on, so on, so on.

Agreed.

I'll get the ball rolling by listing what I think should be available.

The starting point is the home page.  This page should contain static 
areas with a brief description of what Trion is and links to other pages 
including but not limited to the following.

(1) downloading Trion (source snapshot, devkit for Win32 & Linux)

(2) the SourceForge project page for (2.1) bug tracking and (2.2) 
contact information,

(3) documentation (a wiki seems good for this)

(4) a (dynamic) news display for posting recent news items for the 
project in general.

Contact information and how-to-contribute information should also be 
repeated on the web page, probably through a secondary page.

We have three target audiences I would like to address in the long run.

(1) kernel developers
(2) application developers
(3) application users

I think at this point all we really need to be concerned with is kernel 
developers, but once a "shell" is up and running (whatever that may mean 
for our purposes), application developers will become very important. 
Once the kernel is shellable, we can start worrying about voting for 
features and so on, but there's no point until I can get a userspace 
hello-world app appearing on my monitor.

I think for the short run the bug tracking through SourceForge works 
well.  I'm not a big fan of forums:  I would prefer using the mailing 
list for support but I'm open on that count.  The wiki concept works 
well for documentation as its developing and can be captured later into 
a more formally published form.

All this should be tweaked for consistent look-and-feel, using that 
snazzy Trion logo and colour scheme (although other appearance details 
are up for discussion).


Okay, next?

--
Stephen M. Webb
ste...@br...

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Daniel R. <cos...@gm...>]

> Christopher Bertels wrote:
> So my question is: is trion still being developed and if yes, could i  
> help out
> in programming? i will continue reading my book on os design and i'd  
> like to
> help out wherever i can, even if it's the more easy stuff.

Stephen is right when he says that the project does not always develop as  
fast as it could. Nevertheless we also made some considerable progess  
lately, and I still haven't lost my hope that Trion really will take off  
one fine day. Operating system development is a difficult task, maybe it  
just takes some time until you can see the results.

> Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> Heh, yeah, the project is sort of dozing off and on.  Most of thecurrent  
> work on v0.2 was done by Daniel Raffler in a brief flurry ofwork a few  
> months ago.

The reason for my rather errratic coding cycles is that I really have some  
problems stuffing all the theory in my mind into a concrete  
implementation. The nankernel design leads to an extremly "dense" nucleus  
as a lot of decisions with potentially high impact have to be made at an  
early stage. Almost all of the the code I contributed during the first 4-5  
month of the year was hardare related and merely built an abstraction  
layer for the upper components of the nucleus. When I finished with this  
stage I had to return to pencil and paper sketches in order to design the  
rest of the implementation. By now I've finished most of the planning, so  
that I'm really confident that I can continue coding and documenting  
anytime soon.

> Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> I think the next major task in the kernel is to work the scheduler and  
> dispatcher.

Before we can tackle that some more work on the kernel memory manager will  
be needed. I've already finished most of the paper-work for the kernel  
memory system, so that it shouldn't take too long until I can present some  
more details.

> Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> I still think in the coming era of multicore hardware a new OS will rise  
> up.

With the first quadcore getting released just next month, there's probably  
no denying anymore that multi-cores system will be the future. What impact  
this will have on operating system designs is however hard to say. The  
most obvious changes should be in scheduling, but I could also imagine  
that many other areas will be affected indirectly. It's also possible that  
our nanokernel architecture turns out to have some more advantages on such  
machines as it makes the system more reentrant and modular. This should  
allow a more parallel processing of system task, which is the key to high  
performance on multicore systems.

Nevertheless it's in the end always the user applications that make the  
difference: A game that doesn't support multiprocessing on Windows, won't  
perform much better on trion, even if we had the superior multicore  
support. If we're going to lean towards MP systems as our target, we must  
design the whole platform (kernel, drivers, servers, api, libraries,  
programming techniques) with parallel processing on our minds.

> Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
> I feel that in the future we will have big computer clusters who
> will do the main work, and we will have lots of embedded
> thin clients with plenty of bandwidth and cheap not powerful CPUs (
> probably as a part of powerful GPU) so all calculations will be
> offloaded to that CPU clusters, and pre-cooked data will flow as
> compined video-sound stream to the thin clients.

It's not that I've never thought about this idea. Even today such a  
computing farm could pay off for most average users that hardly ever use  
their computer for anthing more expensive that browsing the internet or  
writing some word documents. They could pay their service per volume or as  
a flatrate and the cluster centre would provide them with the necessary  
computing power. As such users don't need a whole computer of their own,  
the computing centre wouldn't have to buy that much hardware (200  
computers for 1000 clients) and could thus sell its services at a  
relativly cheap rate. For the more expensive applications (gaming, video  
editing, etc) it wouldn't pay off as each client would have to be given  
it's own node in the cluster. As our need for computing time grows at  
least as fast as technological progress increases our resources I actually  
doubt that this will ever change.

In a few decades average users might indeed use such services, while power  
users will in my opinion always rely on their own hardware. After all most  
of use still use their own car rather than public transport and owners of  
big farms don't borrow their machines from the community.

As a goal for trion I thus don't know if cluster computing is really such  
a good idea. It's not only that we would be writing software for a harware  
that's still far away, but also that I frankly don't know in what respects  
an operating system for such a platform would have to be different. My  
impression always was that clusters can be handled just fine on the user  
level. A server receives all request and then distributes them among its  
nodes. Both server and client applications are quite simple programs that  
shouldn't require any support by the kernel.

> Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
> I like the idea and it would be nice to implement some ideas I
> shared here two years ago (universal byte-code and so on)

What's the point of having a universal byte-code if the sole remaining  
mainstream architecure is x86-64 ? The only areas where other platforms  
might be used are science, video consoles and possibly IA-64 servers.  
Apart from these most exotic architecures seem to be quite dead nowadays.  
Also note that I'm not sure to what extend the operating system really has  
to support cross platform compatibility. From what I can tell both Java  
and CLI seem to work just fine without additional kernel support.

> Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
> What if we will make some brain storm here ( I love brainstorming ) what
> do we need on the web-site, and later make the voting on the topics and
> will assign priorities on each feature.

In my opinion the main purpose of the site right now is to present the  
project and to recruit developers. For that we don't need a fancy polling  
system, but a simple site that gives a concise (yet complete) description  
of the project providing the visitor with all the information he might  
need.

a) Providing a couple of screen-shots might catch the visitors' attention.  
If screens are available the user at least gets the impression that the  
project is alive and has a code-base that has already reached a certain  
maturity.
b) The site should describe the goals of the kernel in much greater  
detail. Right now there're only a couple of rather generic sentences about  
our design on the page. Developers however want to know much more about a  
project before they might consider to join: Why should I join Trion and  
not some other sourceforge  project ?
c) A project history and a roadmap for the next 6-12 months should give  
the visitors an impression of the current state of the project. It can  
also help us to keep track of the development as we plan in the long term.  
This section should get updated regularly as the development proceeds. It  
could even be an alternative to the not-so-exiting news sections that most  
other projects have.
d) The "What Can I Do?" section should in my opinion be more specific. We  
don't need somebody to do anything, but a developer that know language X  
and has experience with Y to write module Z. The more specific the given  
information, the easier it is for a potential developer to imagine his  
tasks. Visitores interested in the project would no longer have to  
register to the mailing list in order to find out what exactly they could  
contribute.
e) A member page with some private information about the regulars might  
give the project a personal touch. After having leart a bit about the  
other team-members, one might be less hesitant to get into contact with  
the team.

> Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> The best place to start is to build the kernel from source, create  
> yourself a
> floppy or CD and boot your own computer, just to get the hang of it.   
> You can
> also boot the kernel using bochs or, I hear, vmware.  Use the v0.2  
> branch in CVS.

If he's really new to OS develpment chances are that he doesn't know about  
the toolchain or has no experience with installing bochs. It would  
probably also be a good idea to add a number of such beginner tutorials to  
the wiki.

> I'm not a big fan of forums:  I would prefer using the mailinglist for  
> support but I'm open on that count.

I second using the mailing list for development purposes. It has the big  
advantage that every member is reached when something new gets posted,  
while a topic in the forum might not be read by everybody for days or even  
weeks.

> Jeff wrote a long time ago:
> It would be nice if we could use a localized toolchain. Obviously I
> can add in the directories into the path, but does GCC make any
> assumptions about where to find files?

Just in case that this is still an issue: Including the cross-compiler  
directory in your PATH does the job. I've been using this method myself  
and gcc never had any problems finding its files.

regards,
Daniel

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Stephen M. W. <ste...@br...>]

Daniel Raffler wrote:
> 
>> Stephen M. Webb wrote:
>> I think the next major task in the kernel is to work the scheduler and  
>> dispatcher.
> 
> Before we can tackle that some more work on the kernel memory manager will  
> be needed. I've already finished most of the paper-work for the kernel  
> memory system, so that it shouldn't take too long until I can present some  
> more details.

That's great.  Any idea when you'll have something for us?  Is there 
anything we can do to help?

>> Sergey Kuznetsov wrote:
>> What if we will make some brain storm here ( I love brainstorming ) what
>> do we need on the web-site, and later make the voting on the topics and
>> will assign priorities on each feature.

> b) The site should describe the goals of the kernel in much greater  
> detail. Right now there're only a couple of rather generic sentences about  
> our design on the page. Developers however want to know much more about a  
> project before they might consider to join: Why should I join Trion and  
> not some other sourceforge  project ?

Anyone willing to have a go at a first (or, um, maybe second) draft?

> c) A project history and a roadmap for the next 6-12 months should give  
> the visitors an impression of the current state of the project. It can  
> also help us to keep track of the development as we plan in the long term.  
> This section should get updated regularly as the development proceeds. It  
> could even be an alternative to the not-so-exiting news sections that most  
> other projects have.

Okay, a roadmap/project plan and a news section.  The roadmap should 
have a estimated percent complete and estimated time-to-complete.

> d) The "What Can I Do?" section should in my opinion be more specific. We  
> don't need somebody to do anything, but a developer that know language X  
> and has experience with Y to write module Z. The more specific the given  
> information, the easier it is for a potential developer to imagine his  
> tasks. Visitores interested in the project would no longer have to  
> register to the mailing list in order to find out what exactly they could  
> contribute.

Yes.  A 'choose a project' list.  Daniel, you seem to have the best idea 
about what needs to be done still, could you start such a list circulating?

> e) A member page with some private information about the regulars might  
> give the project a personal touch. After having leart a bit about the  
> other team-members, one might be less hesitant to get into contact with  
> the team.

That's one of the things the wiki is good for.

> If he's really new to OS develpment chances are that he doesn't know about  
> the toolchain or has no experience with installing bochs. It would  
> probably also be a good idea to add a number of such beginner tutorials to  
> the wiki.

Yes.  Hmmm, perhaps I'll work on that.

--
smw

Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] Is the project still active?

[Daniel R. <cos...@gm...>]

> That's great.  Any idea when you'll have something for us?  Is there
> anything we can do to help?

Before it makes any sense to continue programming, the source has to get  
prepared for the next step. This means that the new classes have to get  
integrated into the old codebase, and that some of the old code must get  
adapted. I've already started sweeping throught the code some week ago and  
a lot of these fixes are by now already done. Once the new code is  
complete and (halfway) stable I'll commit it to the CVS and we can assign  
coding jobs. It's kind of hard to say how long exactly it's going to take,  
but I guess that it shouldn't be any longer than 1.5 weeks (mind that I'll  
be all busy with school-related-stuff this weekend)

> A 'choose a project' list.  Daniel, you seem to have the best idea
> about what needs to be done still, could you start such a list  
> circulating?

Certainly - once the code is commited I can write a list of jobs that have  
to be done sooner or later. The top-priority at the moment should be the  
memory system and the object classes list/map as they're a requirement for  
the rest of the upper kernel layers (tasks, multiplexion). As this  
subsystem depends on little else in the kernel, it shouldn't be to hard,  
even for somebody not perfectly familiar with the rest of the code, to  
write this portion.

regards,
cosmo86