A different kind of Walter? :-)

[David B. Held]

Alexander Panek wrote:
> [...]
> It might look like a "hackish" (yes, I call anything that's not
> properly designed and implemented - with pedantic attention for each
> detail - hackish..no offense intended, that just applies to my own
> code) kernel would has its benefits in the long-term, but I think a
> proper research to see what features of D can ease the pain of
> operating system development will gain more knowledge and will
> hopefully help me invent A Good Thing (tm).
> [...]

If you guys really are young college students and can afford to sink 
time into something like this, I say go for it 100%.  It really doesn't 
matter whether it amounts to anything, because you will learn a ton from 
it and it will be a fun project.  That's just the kind of thing to do at 
your age.  At my age, you have to do things that matter (read: pay the 
bills), which is to say that you simply cannot afford to do something 
like write an OS kernel, and I really envy you.  If you're really good, 
you can make a name for yourself with it, even if the kernel is a 
commercial failure, which is worth plenty to your career.

That being said, I think it would be *particularly* clever of you to use 
your start-from-scratch kernel to explore new ideas in multi-processing 
and massive multithreading, but this would imply having decent multi-CPU 
hardware to play with.  Most of the OS support we have is decades old 
technology hacked together to keep up with the hardware, but maybe you 
have an opportunity to do it right from the start.  That is, to create a 
kernel where multiprocessing is as fundamental as memory management or 
process scheduling.  We try to write lock-free algorithms using just one 
special assembly instruction, and look how far we have to bend over 
backwards to make it work.  If an MP-friendly kernel gave us more 
primitives than CAS, because it was designed that way from the start 
(meaning, the process scheduler was hacked up in a new way), I suspect 
that you could make MP a lot easier on users.  Just some stuff to think 
about...

Dave