d8b O/S - Future software development.

[captainamerica]

I am going to assume that under the hood, db8’s O/S is proprietary and as such, we do not have any kind of access, knowledge or legal I.P. rights into any software development improvements. I am not a programmer but the trends of general computing, access to software frameworks and libraries are providing some unique opportunities these days. Thus, what about writing some kind software wrappers around the O/S for improvement? Apologize if this something we have discussed before, but I was curious on all your thoughts.

[arjepsen]

It has been discussed, though not really thorougly in depth.
Anyway several of us have tried making MackieOS run under a virtual machine.
The problem is that the OS is very particular about which hardware is connected.
For my experiments, the OS stopped booting when it tried to activate “write combining” for the graphics card.
And I didn´t find any way to make the virtual machine emulate that.
I tried to see if I could make the VM emulate one of the ati cards that seems to work for these machines - also without luck.

I think it would be SOOOO awesome if someone could hack the OS, and make it work on more modern machines, but I suspect it would require a very hardcore programmer to reverse engineer the OS - and I dont know anyone of those

[captainamerica]

Yes....I have friend who is a senior software developer at a leading tech firm here in Boston and will try and pick his brains. I worry a bit about the VM emulation world as a solution - although I have seen great success with other vintage OS actually work. Perhaps the "hard coding" that the d8b makes at the hardware graphic application layers is compromising things...perhaps there are workarounds.

[arjepsen]

Keep us posted!

[captainamerica]

any idea what's under the hood of d8b O/S? Was built off FreeBSD, what about POSIX?

[arjepsen]

It seems to be built on a windows structure.

[captainamerica]

spoke to my software friend and he said this will be difficult to do. Did you want to see how far we could push this via VM mode?

[Neosphere]

Hey, Guys keep sharing your knowledge.....!!

[arjepsen]

As of right now, I believe the status is:
MackieOS does not work through a virtual machine.
The reason is, that the OS checks some very specific things about hardware.
In my tests, I think I could make the VM emulate a compatible graphics card - but the OS checks for something called "write combining", which the VM couldn't emulate.

So for this to go any further, someone has to hack the OS to not do these checks.
I think the only other option is to reverse engineer the whole OS.
It's only around 4 mb, but that's actually still a lot of code to go through, and I'm guessing it would take longer than what most people wish to spend on it.
I think I would gladly pay for someone to do that - but I don't know any hardcore programmers, and also I don't know what it would cost.

[captainamerica]

yes...and one of my hardcore programmer told me it would be very very hard/long to reverse engineer the OS...