Operating Systems

Version History

Date	Description
Oct 26, 2021	Add the Mach family references
Dec 18, 2020	extracted from the summary doc

My personal interest in CS starts from OS. I started by writing my own OS, it was such a rewarding and joyful journey. Since then, I’m hooked with any OS related projects. This page, is my attempt to document the well-known and less well-known OSes. This list is not meant to be complete, a lot of acedemic OS papers are not mentioned here.

This awsome-os has a more complete list.

Mainstream

• Linux 0.0.1
  • This is the first linux source code released by Linus. Despite several designs are static or obsolete from today’s point of view, it showcases a simple and elegant solution.
• Plan 9 OS
  • Legendary OS.
  • So many systems are influended by Plan 9 (e.g., Go, gVisor)
• illumos, a fork of the Oracle Solaris OS.
• seL4 Microkernel
• Mach Family
  • Mach 3.0 the last version from CMU. Code in Github.
  • GNU Mach and GNU Hurd
    • MacOS Darwin XNU
• BSD Family
  • BSD releases all the companion software packages along with the kernel. So there is a tighter relation between them. If you ever wondered how XXX is done, or how to get YYY from OS, this is where you can look into.
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • NetBSD
  • TrueOS
• Unikernel
  • OSv. A lightweight unikernel.
  • IncludeOS
  • Rumprun
  • Solo5. Unikernel as processes!
• Google Fuchsia
  • TODO.

(Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_timeline.en.svg)

Hobby

• Visopsys
  • “It features a simple but functional graphical interface, pre-emptive multitasking, and virtual memory”
• BootOS

Academic

• Singularity.
  • A research OS from MSR. Very interesting one. It leverages certain PL features to write secure and dependable OS. It also allows verification. It never landed as a commercial one, but it does inspire certain follow-up works.
  • Several old research OSes have also used certain language features to carry out security measures (e.g., V++).
• MIT Corey
  • I think the code itself is based on jos.

Linux Distribution

Ever thought about how to go from Linux Kernel to a full Linux Distribution?

• Read: Linux From Scratch
• systemd