An uncrashable OS
Saturday, July 11th, 2009In my travels around the interweb, looking for cool open source projects, I’ve come across many very cool looking technologies that don’t seem to have much external support yes.
A small unix operating system with a real working microkernel, it aims to be small, easy to understand (from a technical perspective) and robust. All drivers run in userspace and can be restarted transparently to prevent crashes. Theoretically, something built on minix would be extremely robust and stable.
A (very) C like language with changes and enhancements to allow for writing secure low level programs. A system written in Cyclone would be robust against buffer-overflows and various other ’standard’ attacks. It also happens to compile out of the box on Minix.
A small implementation of python, similar in architecture to Lua.
My Dream
A system as follows:A stack of Minix, Cyclone and TinyPy to make a small, secure operating system that is easy to program in for end users. All the core (or as much as possible) would be written in Cyclone, porting pieces of Minix as necessary. TinyPy would also be ported to Cyclone and would be the primary language for everything that didn’t need to be written in Cyclone.
I’d like to find a small, standard piece of hardware I could test it on (perhaps something based on Arduino?) But I doubt I’ll ever get time to do this unless I become a Ph.D. and make undergrads and grad students work on it.
But it would be totally cool to have a full stack embeddable OS that was secure by default and very robust.
