Author Topic: ES/2 to be instant-on OS  (Read 4291 times)

RickCHodgin

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ES/2 to be instant-on OS
« on: January 19, 2019, 12:18:54 pm »
I have been planning my driver model, and ES/2 will use a tier to launch drivers and boot.  Placeholders in early tiers will be replaced by installed drivers in later tiers.

This will allow ES/2 to boot in a second or two from a cold boot on BIOS machines once BIOS transfers control to the boot loader.  The keyboard, mouse, local storage, display and desktop will be available almost instantly.  Other hardware devices will become available later as the OS boots them in the background over the next several seconds, resulting in some functionality being delayed, but the main interaction will exist, and with placeholders that are retry-capable, even early-failure drivers will be able to retry and resume, resulting in a largely carefree experience for users.  I'm very excited about this model.  It seems to be what is required for a proper user experience.  It also means a non-monolithic kernel, so most hardware drivers could be updated in real-time without rebooting.

ES/2 will be written mostly in a C-like language, and will target ARM and x86/x64 ISAs natively.  It will require 80486 with integrated FPU or higher, and I'm not sure what ARM architecture yet, but probably an SoC based around Cortex A9 or later.

I plan to begin full-time development on ES/2 in early 2020, with ES/1 development beginning a few months before that.  The ES/2 API should be released around May 2019.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 12:39:50 pm by Rick C. Hodgin »

Doug Bissett

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Re: ES/2 to be instant-on OS
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2019, 07:01:51 pm »
One problem, that I see, is that BIOS, as we know it, is going away. Currently, most machines still have the UEFI CSS module, to emulate BIOS, but some machines no longer have that. I expect that it won't be too long, and none of them will have CSS, or if they do, it will be broken because it only exists because they haven't got around to removing it. Best to work with an UEFI model.

RickCHodgin

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Re: ES/2 to be instant-on OS
« Reply #2 on: January 19, 2019, 07:04:44 pm »
One problem, that I see, is that BIOS, as we know it, is going away. Currently, most machines still have the UEFI CSS module, to emulate BIOS, but some machines no longer have that.

ES/2 will move forward with technology, but I'm going to make it work with older machines first on x86.  I want a low-end late 90s machine with updated memory and possibly updated video card (500 MHz single-core 32-bit CPU, >= 1 GB RAM) to be usable.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 07:12:48 pm by Rick C. Hodgin »