itsy bitsy Unix

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner spc at conman.org
Fri Mar 18 12:48:55 CST 2005


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)



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