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Meulengracht / MollenOS

MollenOS/Vali is a modern operating system that is built with focus on abstraction and a modular design, allowing anyone to port it to any architecture. It currently targets the x86-32 and x86-64 platform.
http://www.mollenos.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
447 stars 21 forks source link

could MollenOS fit on a floppy? #231

Closed informer2016 closed 4 years ago

informer2016 commented 4 years ago

Even today the floppies are still being used, for example - as virtual floppies inside the coreboot open source BIOS. Just imagine: your wonderful OS could be a part of someone's BIOS build! _(for coreboot supported motherboard, maybe you have or could get one - see https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards )_

@Meulengracht , If you already have a coreboot-supported motherboard, or a real chance to get one, - wouldn't it be cool to be able to launch your own OS straight from the BIOS chip? ;) With one simple command its possible to add any floppy to coreboot BIOS build - and then you see it as a boot entry! Multiple floppies could be added this way (as long as you have enough space left inside the BIOS flash chip, luckily LZMA compression could be used for the stored floppies to reduce their occupied size)

Meulengracht commented 4 years ago

Yes the boot loader, initial ramdisk and kernel could fit on a floppy disk (would require only 800-900kb) - however the user space would not be able fit, and would require external storage in order to use any graphical UI

informer2016 commented 4 years ago

@Meulengracht 2.88MB "double sized" floppy images are also supported by coreboot+SeaBIOS as well as QEMU and VirtualBox, although such floppies are rare like unicorns in a physical world...

Meulengracht commented 4 years ago

You would be able to run a console environment in my OS on less than 1,4mb.

But you would need atleast 1gb for everything including the Window manager and all libraries

informer2016 commented 4 years ago

@Meulengracht I see, indeed it may be hard to use the remaining 2MB for something truly useful, that's if your OS isn't written on ASM or C-- like KolibriOS. Thank you for reply, and have a nice day ;-)