TINOS is a small 32-bit operating system for Intel platform. It is aimed to have all the capabilities of modern operating systems, i.e. multitasking, multithreading, microkernel architecture etc., while maintaing relatively small size and low demand for system resources. It is rather a workstation OS, not multi-processing, on-line transactions server platform. Now it remainds me a multitasking DOS.
The aim of the project is to develop small multi-purpose operating system for Intel platform. TINOS will hopefully support the following:
It's being developed mainly for educational purposes. For now, TINOS is based on monolithic kernel design, as it was somewhat simpler to start with this approach. Then I will migrate towards microkernel architecture. This way I'll be able to experiment with both worlds. Till now, I'm not convinced which one is better.
TINOS is being developed using DOS GCC port known as DJGPP, version 2.7.2. That's the coolest development environment ever. TINOS is written entirely in C, only small parts are written in assembly. The development team is one person: me
Kernel manages processes and threads (although multithreading is not supported yet), virtual memory management (each process runs in its own address space, no swaping yet), core device drivers and core filesystem. Current development is focused on microkernel itself and C library. I hope I will be able to port some stuff to TINOS soon.
The following components are ready (partially at least)