#osdev

the disk is divided evenly into blocks.

an inode (if that's the right terminology?) is just the first block of the file/directory. if the file or directory contents exceed the block size, it allocates a new block, and stores a pointer to it. kinda like a linked list.

for directories, the data in the inode is a list of inodes of the files within, along with their filename and type. the type not only determines how the OS treats it but also how the kernel treats it—a file of a type relating to a directory type is treated as a directory.

this does mean that theres no way for the kernel to know if an inode is a file or directory, without looking at the parent directory.

inode zero, the first block on the disk, is always treated as a directory, which is the root.

the user can choose to reserve some blocks for listing which blocks are used, so that it doesn't have to seek the whole disk for a free block.

if the block is at the end of the chain, the bytes used for identifying the next block in the chain is reused for showing how many bytes are in the block, so that content can be of any size, not just a multiple of the block data size.

the uefi specification 2.8:

hi, thanks for bringing this to my attention! i can't seem to replicate it though, even when i increase the image size to 128 mb it boots just fine in mame (and i don't really feel like pulling out my mac plus to test when i know it works in mame)

are you sure you're using the right command line options for mame? i can run it just fine with something along the lines of mame macplus -scsibus:1 harddisk -hard1 $(pwd)/root.img (god i wish i could get this to format properly i'm genuinely so fucking mad at tumblr rn. genuinely inexcusable)

and are you sure you're not getting the root filesystem mount error confused with the fact that it fails to boot into a shell for some reason? because i've been aware of that problem for a while, but haven't been motivated to try and fix it because i've been working on an os specifically designed to solve the many issues with nommu uclinux on low memory platforms

Web servers require layers upon layers of software and hardware. Routing, multiplexing, protocols, everything. Rust is a viable solution to making a web server, because it's safe and fast, and has many crates to help (tokio, warp, ws). You can make a browser in Rust, as well as games.

But at the same time, you can make an operating system with it. The lowest level of access to a computer you can get, creating and dereferencing raw pointers, running on the CPU itself. You can make not only games but game engines. You can make compilers. You can do FFI. You can make FFI. Your entire stack can be made with Rust.

You would make a web server in JavaScript, Java, C#, Go, or maybe even Python. But you wouldn't use any of those to make an operating system, because they require a runtime aren't bare metal enough, or throw exceptions. They are good for making web servers because they abstract away problems like buffer overflows, and they are extendable languages. You would use C, C++, or Zig. They are good for making operating systems because it's easy to dig into memory ((unsigned short*)0xb8000 is the VGA text buffer).

Rust can do both. Sure, you can make a web server in those OS languages, but you need to make sure it's safe as hell. Rust itself is safe as hell.

Just a quick reminder here, this is a customized computing stack manifestation game where I simply write what I desire and then let the wider universe manifest it for me whatever way that means, including personal efforts of mine. Boils down from customizing and adapting research material into a actionable series of items to manifest.

Ashur dream specifications

(mid-tower personal workstation computer)

2+ 2560x1440p monitors (one vertical, one or more horizontal)

Intel Core i5-4690 @ 3.5 GHz with its 4-cores (hoping forward to upgrade the RISC-V + OpenPOWER like processor for something decent with ~12-cores & much more open design) central processor unit

32GB of RAM

Some recent mid-range AMD GPU

64 GB Linux swap partition (mostly for virtual machines and RAMdisk partitions)

4TB+ SSD storage

Bluray burner

Floppy drive

Cassette / datasette drive

Themed GRUB bootloader

S6 init system

Arch-like package manager and software ecosystem

Customized alternative Linux kernel between Linux Libre & Zen kernel ( XanMod + Liquorix )

ZealOS, Parade, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana...

CLADO, DIS, Venera, Perseus, Maskoch, Synod, Monad, Valenz, Constans?

KDE Plasma with Liquid shell as desktop environment, complete with custom ricing, dot files & all the KDE desktop environment utilities;

Bash + Fish, Tmux, Astro-Neo-Vim with LSP, Emacs, LibreOffice Suite, Calligra, Bottles, Wine, WineTricks, QGIS, Firefox, LibreWolf, Dolphin, Konsole, Inkscape, Karbon, OpenStreetMap, GPlates, GProjector, Itch, Steam, GOG Galaxy, Lutris, Cyberpunk 2077, Ken Silverman's, FreeBASIC, Common Lisp, Godot + Qodot, VLC, MPV, .ogg / .ogv media player, musical tracker, 'Landchad.net', Brasero, K3B, FloppyFormatter, LibreCAD, AutoCAD, Blender, Kate, Qt, Nim, MUSL, C compiler, assembly monitor, HxD debugger, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, F#, C#, GNU make, NASM, Sweet Home 3D, some digital audio workstation software, Audacious, FFMPEG, Wayland, Morevna OpenToonz, some HTTP(S) web server suite, MongoDB, Hexo, Netlify CMS, RSS feed reader + generator, Pomodoro, Calendar, timely Tracker, Notion-like service, Tape, Gollum, some level editors, FreeCiv, The Sims 2, SimCity 4, Quake 1, Doom 1 & Doom 2, Markdown / Argdown, Konqueror, some WYSISYG rich media editor, some Raycaster engine, Daggerfall Unity, Portal 2, Source (1 & 2) Engine modding, some VirtualTableTop software, some remote desktop control software like VNC, OpenSSH, some distributed share storage software, Trenchbroom, StableDiffusionXL, ChatGPT open source alternative, DAO, Krita, GIMP, G'MIC & its plugins, PaintDotNet, CataclysmDDA, CataclysmBDA, Evennia, Python 3, Firefox for KDE (Developer Edition), Perl, PHP, MariaDB, lighttpd, Apache, Nginx, Themix Oomox GTK+ theme editor, Falkon, ...

Custom shell scripts, interactive REPL programming languages, some GUI programs, command aliases and dot file configurations;

?

Venera (computation "deque" project)

Original components:

RISC-V + OpenPOWER = LibreVast (tribble word-based open hardware architecture designed for daily use & tinkering developer purposes)

Tropix + OGAS = Nucleus (optimized distributed processing micro-kernel, like 'Inferno' & 'Plan9')

RedSeaFS + Parade = CLADOgram (direct-access rich media agentive filesystem & file server suite)

KDE + POSIX-compilant CDE = VUE (lightweight desktop environment with profound customization options)

CommonLisp w/ CLOS + Nim = Pan-Lisp (both low-level and high-level REPL programming language)

Existing components:

Fish, Tmux, Vim, Konsole, Flatpak, Git

KDE Plasma w/ Liquid shell alternative

Konqueror, LibreWolf

GIMP w/ G'MIC & Krita w/ G'MIC

Hexo (flat blog self-hosting web server), MariaDB, "Landchad.net" stuff

QEMU, Wine, Wine-tricks, Proton, Bottles, Lutris

Trenchbroom, Godot w/ Qodot

Kate, KDevelop, Okteta, Mousepad, Notepadqq