18 Mar
2005
18 Mar
'05
10:48 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Roger Merchberger once stated:
I had OS-9 Level 1 easily running in 24Kbytes (altho 64K RAM was necessary
in the computer), and IIRC just to see if I could do it, I had a bootdisk
that shoehorned it into 16K, but there were precious few modules in memory
for that.
Too bad QNX isn't open source---the kernel for that is about 8K for the
Pentium version (and most of that is probably due to the code being aligned
along cache boundaries (32 bytes I think)). It's small size is primarily
due to what it does, which isn't much---just task switching, memory
management, interrupt service routines and message passing. Everything else
(including device drivers, file systems, etc) are handled by userland
processes.
-spc (It's a very cool OS that fortunately, *is* on topic for this list)