Comment by mbac32768
16 days ago
Yeah this. I tried to modify a hobby OS recently so it would process the "soft reboot" button (to speed up being rebooted in GCP) and it was so unbelievably hard to figure out how to support it. I tried following the instructions on the OS Dev Wiki and straight up reading what both Linux and FreeBSD do and still couldn't make progress. Yes. The thing that happens when you tell Windows or Linux to "restart". Gave up on this after spending days on it.
The people who develop OSes are cut from a different cloth and are not under the usual economic pressures.
I also think that they have access to more helpful resources than people outside the field do, e.g. being able to contact people working on the lower layers to get the missing info. These channels exist in the professional world, but they are hard to access.
To clarify, are you having trouble getting the signal to reboot from the gcp console into your OS? Or are you having trouble rebooting on gcp?
I mean when the hobby OS wants to shut down, it can power the machine it's running on down. Not unlike what would happen if you clicked power off on your desktop OS menu.
Getting it to work on GCP meant properly driving something called the Intel PIIX4 controller which was emulated into the VM.
Separately from the OS being able to turn itself off, the OS needs to process a signal received by the hypervisor on this controller to support the hypervisor gracefully shutting it down. Otherwise GCP will wait 90 seconds after it has sent the shut down signal to give up and terminate the VM itself.
The problem I was trying to solve was (a) OS can shut itself down in GCP (b) restarts in GCP from the GCP console would be instant, rather than take 90+ seconds
The VMM on GCP has only really been tested with Linux. You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux.
> You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux.
Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS.
I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a little more about random pieces of computing. If I ran on GCP, I'd want the reboot button to work. That sounds useful.
On the topic, I don't see why anyone would want to build a general purpose OS. There's enough already and even with the shrinking of hardware variety, there's a lot of stuff to support to make a general purpose OS work on enough hardware for people to consider using it. You can take Linux or a BSD and hack it up pretty good to explore a lot of OS ideas. Chances are you're going to borrow some of their drivers anyway, and then you'll end up with at least some similarity... may as well start there and save a lot of time. (My hobby OS has a custom kernel and custom drivers, but I only support a bare minimum of devices... (pc) console i/o, one real NIC, and virtio-net... that's all I need; I might add support for more NICs and more consoles later)
I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP.
They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec
The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary.
9 replies →