Cy/VOS

My operating system: Cy/VOS

Introduction

Cy/VOS has been through several incarnations, with widely different concepts. Cy/VOS kernel 2, written entirely in assembly and FORTH, is being slowly retooled into a 16-bit OS called Cy/VOS embedded.

The main tree is now kernel 3. It's been entirely rewritten in C. The kernel is a hard realtime OS, internally multithreaded. There are no busywaits anywhere in the kernel. Memory management is complete, and a basic VFS exists with support for FAT12 on floppy drives.

A mod player of my creation (xmod2) has been successfully ported to Cy/VOS. When sound support is a bit more stable, I'll probably post it.

NEW: Discuss Cy/VOS on the project WIKI!

Screenshots

A screenshot of Cy/VOS kernel 3 booting.

Cy/VOS Embedded

The code is now currently written in a mixture of intel assembler (using nasm) and FORTH. There is no residual C code.

The OS currently handles loading from floppy disk, booting into PMODE, setting up page and descriptor tables, and configuring interrupt tables. Memory management is functional, if not complete.

A lot has improved, and now it can run some simple FORTH code. Conway's Game of Life was successfully ported (no, I did not write the game itself, although it was heavily modified to suit the intricacies of Cy/VOS).

Screenshots

Cy/VOS Booting in BOCHS

Cy/VOS Command Shell

Conway's Game of Life (demonstration)

Demo

There are now two different types of distribution, by popular demand.

Zipped ISO

This may be the easiest for those on a windows platform to use. Simply download, unzip, burn to a CD-RW, and turn on boot from CD. The system should come up in Cy/VOS. This will probably be updated less frequently than the regular disk images, but major snapshots or demos will likely be made available in this format.

Disk Image

Disk images are my preferred method of distribution. You can write them to a floppy, or boot them in Bochs (slow... so very slow) or VMWare (much faster). For the Mac users, while you obviously cannot run Cy/VOS natively, it has been reported working on Virtual PC!

To use the demo image, you will need a blank disk. For Windows users, you will need a program like WinZip to unzip the image file, and a program like RAWRITE.EXE to write a disk image. For Linux users (or most other similar Free *nix), simply type:

Linux Disk Instructions

cat cyvosXXX.img.gz | gzip -d > /dev/fd0

If your browser unzips the file for you during download (some versions of Netscape reportedly do this), then you should leave out the "| gzip -d" part of the command.

Download a disk image of the current version here:

Licence

This disk image is provided for intellectual curiosity only. For the time being, Cy/VOS is not open source.

All material on these pages is Copyright (c) Jennifer E. Elaan.