Kid Operating System

See also: KOS

Kid Operating System (KOS) is a development project of a Operating system to educational goal under license GNU LPG. It functions on architecture X86.

The project began in June 1998, on the initiative of young programmers French high-school pupils. Those wished to look further into their knowledge in programming by developing themselves a small operating system. Inexperience played a great part in the projection of the development, which was relatively slow at the beginning. The development team counted until ten active people. At present (in 2005), the team is reduced to 3 active developers.

History

  • June 1998: Creation of the project by Dimitri Macaw and Thomas Petazzoni

  • at the end of 1998: A mini operating system starts
  • April 1999: Arrival of Julien Munier , major actor of the project. Call to contribution.
  • at the end of 1999 and at the beginning of 2000: Two physical meetings between the developers, outcome with a mini system offering of the very limited functionalities (not of management memory, not of multitask)
  • August 2000: Complete recasting of the system
  • Since: Constant work on this second version of the system

A more complete history is available on the site of the project.

Objectives of the project

The objective of the project is not as soon as possible to obtain an operating system functional and supposed to compete with other free systems or owners. The objective is purely educational and teaching. For the developers, this project is the occasion to learn the programming low-level, to include/understand the inner working of an operating system and architecture of a computer, to learn how to work in group and to use the work tools collaboratif. For the others, project KOS brings documents, a bibliography and a source code available under license LPG.

Specificities of the system

The operating system KOS presents some characteristics compared to other systems such as GNU/Linux for example.

First of all, it is a modular system : the whole of the core is broken up into modules, which are connected together to the starting of the system. It is not a question of a system with micronucleus, but well of a monolithic system. However, the modular approach makes it possible to properly separate the portable and nonportable parts of the system, and to make sure of the clearness of the interfaces between the various modules.

In addition, KOS tries to set up an original system of access to the resources of the computer and system. The traditional approach of Unix, laying out of a single interface of access for the resources, all considered as files, seemed too restrictive with the eyes of the developers. Those wished to take account of the real disparity of the resources managed by an operating system: various files, charts its, graphics cards, peripherals, sockets… For that, they try to set up a named architecture Karm (for Kos Abstract Resource Management), giving access each resource by various interfaces, according to specificities of this one.

KOS has some other original characteristics, in particular on the level of the management of the virtual memory.

Simple Operating System

Starting from KOS, two of the developers of this system launched S.O.S, Simple Operating System. The objective of this project is to detail, stage by stage the realization of a small operating system. Each stage gives place in an article published in a monthly magazine and is accompanied by the associated code.

External bonds

  • the site of project KOS

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