chaos-devel Mailing List for The chaos Operating System

After some more days of hacking, we are proud to release the second 
pre-alpha release of chaos.net (the re-engineered chaos using the .NET 
architecture, written in C#).

Most important visible change is that Cluido + the rest of the system 
has now been improved to the point where you can type commands in Cluido 
and make the system do something. This is a great leap forward and it 
also makes debugging the system tremendeously simpler!

Get it at http://prdownloads.sf.net/chaos/chaos.net-0.0.2.zip (source)
or http://prdownloads.sf.net/chaos/chaos.net-0.0.2-bin.zip (binary)
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

On 3/28/07, Henrik Hallin-M1 <he...@ca...> wrote:

> *) Cluido now reads commands and echoes them.

Two words: way cool! This means we can make Cluido do something useful. :-)

Great work, Henrik! I'll test the code ASAP.
--
Best regards,
Per Lundberg


-- 
Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Hi,

I've tried to run the chaos.net stuff on mono and partly succeeded. The 
console server appears to run, and cluido also starts up (an exception 
is fired because it can't connect to storm.net). Storm.NET does not 
start however, and no exception is thrown. There might be some debugging 
functionality in mono, but I haven't tried it...

I suspect the reason is that storm.net uses richtextbox which doesn't 
seem to be implemented in their Windows.Forms-stuff. Since there is 
nothing "rich" about the way i use the rich text box, I could probably 
use some other control and make it work on mono.

This is cool, since it allows people to work on chaos.net regardless of 
operating system.

Henrik

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

Hi everyone,

For those of you who aren't reading the svn list, here's a short update:

*) The IPC mechanism has been updated and reworked a couple of times. :)

*) An event concept has been added for servers to use to notify their 
clients about state changes (this is used for keyboard events by the 
console server).

*) The console server now supports multiple consoles with keyboard event 
handling.

*) Cluido now reads commands and echoes them.

What needs to be done I think is:

*) Improve stability of the whole system, e.g. allow clients and servers 
to die without storm dying too. Allow clients to exit cleanly if the 
service goes away. Allow servers to correctly dispose of resources 
associated with a client when the client goes away. In short, make 
things not crash. :)

*) Improve cluido and make it do something useful. I think we will need 
some kind of TTY server in the middle somewhere. But that can come 
later. First we need VFS, but that can come later as well.

*) Discuss libraries and their structure.

*) Security.

*) Fullscreen and graphics drawing support in the console server/library 
+ tornado! :)

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

On 3/23/07, Anders =D6hrt <and...@gm...> wrote:
> One of the main issues I had with chaos last time was it took so long
> to set everything up so that once I could start development and
> booting, I'd already gotten tired of it. This should help with this
> issues very well.

This can not be said too much. We should not underestimate the
importance of having a very straight forward way of getting started.
And not just for getting chaos up and running, this should be for a
working development environment too.

I think the biggest reason for the success of PHP is it's ease of
getting started. Create a file and write code.. No more, no less.

Regards,
  Johannes

per...@us... wrote:

Hi Henrik et al,

IPC now works again, it seems. :-) However, the question has arised (if 
I understand you correctly Henrik) as to whether our connections (which 
are similar to named pipes in Unix/Windows) should be unidirectional or 
bidirectional.

What I mean is this: you can have the connection work in such a way that 
the initiator of a request is always the client. And the server handles 
the request and possibly sends something back to the client, depending 
on the type of the request.

Perhaps I'm misunderstand you Henrik but you seem to be proposing that 
the IPC should work in another way than this? Perhaps what you are 
thinking about is asynchronous calls, where the server needs to initiate 
the call back to the client.


What I've also realized that we should have also is something akin to 
Unix/Posix signals.

Signals are a way for the operating system to notify a process that 
something unpredicted happened. For example, that the process is 
terminating. :-) (SIGTERM) Another useful signal is SIGHUP, which is 
sent if the modem line is being hangup (or if Putty is closed, I 
presume, in a modern scenario).

We could implement signals using the service system. By default, 
Storm.NET has default handlers for all "signals". But, you can create a 
service with a certain class name (signal) and you are then assigned the 
service path /signal/<pid> which Storm.NET and other processes in the 
system can send requests to (think "kill 12345" and similar).

> Revision: 1284
>           http://chaos.svn.sourceforge.net/chaos/?rev=1284&view=rev
> Author:   perlundberg
> Date:     2007-03-24 14:28:52 -0700 (Sat, 24 Mar 2007)
> 
> Log Message:
> -----------
> Fixed the IPC to work since Henrik is too lazy to do it himself. ;-)
> 
> I think this is similar to how you intended to solve it, right?
> 
> Modified Paths:
> --------------
>     trunk/chaos.net/Chaos.IPC/IPCMessage.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Chaos.IPC/IPCMessageArgument.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Chaos.Service/ServiceConnection.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Chaos.Service/StormConnection.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Servers/Server.Console/ConnectionHandler.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Storm.NET/ClientConnection.cs
>     trunk/chaos.net/Storm.NET/Connection.cs
> 
> Added Paths:
> -----------
>     trunk/chaos.net/release.sh
> 
> Property Changed:
> ----------------
>     trunk/chaos.net/Chaos.Console/
> 
> 
> This was sent by the SourceForge.net collaborative development platform, the world's largest Open Source development site.
> 
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-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Johannes Lundberg wrote:

> I'm not saying this is easily done, but it would certainly be
> interesting to try out. :)

Well, feel free to implement it. :-) I also think it is a very 
interesting idea and in line with the chaos philosophy of being kind of 
"revolutionary" in our ideas. There is no point in doing a new operating 
system just to emulate another operating system, too many people have 
already done that. (Hello, Linus, nice to see you're sneak-peaking at 
what we're doing. ;)
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

On 3/22/07, Per Lundberg <pe...@gm...> wrote:
> > I'd like this to be combined with some sort of memory-presistance too.
> > Kind of a new philosophy for building applications. Instead of writing
> > applications that create everything (memory-wise) from scratch
> > everytime you start the application (like reading the configuration
> > file, loading icons etc), you do the setup once and then just resume
> > from a post-setup state when a user starts the application. I talked
> > quite a lot with Per about this a year ago or so. If you do an strace
> > of a small Linux shell utility, there is a lot going on under the hood
> > that could be done a more effective manner.
>
> I remember this and I definitely think it's something that ought to be
> considered further. There might be disadvantages with that approach but
> if we can make it work, we can probably have applications launching
> much, much faster on chaos than on any existing operating system in use
> today - which is good. I think Windows XP bootup on my machine is too
> slow, for example, and part of the reason is that all the startup
> applications need to be ready before you can do much anything.

I think such an approach would work very well with todays disks too.
High throughput but high seek times. Instead of doing 35 seeks to open
all libraries, config files etc, you just do one seek and sequential
read to get the application going. This could be implemented by having
startup-methods on the applications, which are called dynamically the
first time, if the application havn't been run before.

One concern though is how to do dependancies. When system or file
changes are done, which invalidate the "startup state memory image"
(or whatever it should be called), it needs to be flagged properly as
outdated, and recreated on the next run.

One cool thing would be if it would be possible to combine a
system-wide startup image with a user-specific startup image (maybe
for his configuration etc). With .NET/CLR, I think this could be
doable. Basically, the system-wide image have references to the
user-specific image (and a diffrent image / "collection of objets" are
loaded for each user).

I'm not saying this is easily done, but it would certainly be
interesting to try out. :)

Regards,
  Johannes Lundberg

On 3/23/07, Anders =D6hrt <and...@gm...> wrote:

Hi Anders & welcome back! :)

> I'm impressed! I like the direction the project has takes, which feels
> like an exciting development. I've not looked closed into C#, since I
> now believe everyone should switch to Visual DataFlex (shameless
> promotion: http://www.visualdataflex.com/features.asp?pageid=3D679), but
> it's interesting non the less.

C# is really a great programming language to work with, methinks (and
I think Henrik Hallin agrees with me strongly). It has everything we
need and few negative aspects. One is possibly that you cannot specify
default parameters:

class Test
{
  public int Test123(int i =3D -1)
  {
  }
}

...that would be invalid C# code. But you can achieve the exact same
effect using method overloading (making one method with no parameters
in this case and let that method call the other) so it's not really a
problem... They probably removed it to make the code we write less
obscure. :-)

> One of the main issues I had with chaos last time was it took so long
> to set everything up so that once I could start development and
> booting, I'd already gotten tired of it. This should help with this
> issues very well.

It sure does. I mean, developing the system on Microsoft Windows
(rather than GNU/Linux) is a very good thing since it makes it much
easier for most people to try out the system and perhaps start hacking
around.

Please comment my other email about Chaos.Security if you like,
perhaps you have some valuable comments to add?
--=20
Best regards,
Per Lundberg

> After some days of fairly intensive hacking evenings, we are proud to
> release the first "version" of chaos.net (the re-engineered chaos using
> the .NET architecture, written in C#). Eventually, this system will be
> self-hosted on top of the storm kernel, but until we are ready for that,
> we will develop the system as a set of applications communicating with a
> fake kernel (Storm.NET) running as a user process on top of the .NET
> runtime.

I'm impressed! I like the direction the project has takes, which feels
like an exciting development. I've not looked closed into C#, since I
now believe everyone should switch to Visual DataFlex (shameless
promotion: http://www.visualdataflex.com/features.asp?pageid=679), but
it's interesting non the less.

One of the main issues I had with chaos last time was it took so long
to set everything up so that once I could start development and
booting, I'd already gotten tired of it. This should help with this
issues very well.

// Anders

Henrik Hallin-UU wrote:

Hi Henrik,

> What we can start doing now is to implement a real shell (Cluido). This 
> ought to easy debugging of servers. Anyone up for the task?

Johannes volunteered and I might also be able to help with some bits there.

The Chaos.Security is also something that needs to be implemented soon, 
as you wrote in another email. As I mentioned to you, we should make 
Storm.NET launch a set of servers on startup (and give them the 
capabilities it feels like). Then the Server.Boot should launch Cluido, 
dropping capabilities as needed.

The capability system can be fairly easy but flexible. Perhaps just a 
set of regular expressions or something. The important point is: 
Storm.NET has full capabilities (.* in regexp talk). When launching a 
new server, it can set any capability less than or equal to its own 
capabilities on the new process.

Likewise when the Server.Boot will launch Cluido, it can give it less 
than or equal to its own capabilities.

If we go the regexp road (maybe a bit overkill really) I think the "less 
than or equal" formula might be a bit hard to implement, to put it 
mildly. ;)

Perhaps a form of simpler globbing is more suitable:

Service.* - access to all services.
Service.Console - access to a specific service.
Storm.CreateService - access to the specific system call in Storm.NET.

The problem here is not the implementation really but rather to find a 
suitable level of fine-grainedness. If you make it too specific, it 
might get over-complicated to add capabilities to a user etc. (you need 
to find all the specific capabilities that he needs - can obviously be 
partially remedied by having capability groups, preferrably with a form 
of inheritance so that a capability group can contain other capability 
groups). If you make it too non-specific, we have reimplemented Linux, 
welcome to the 70's again. :-P

Back to where we are now: As soon as the IPC works again :) (it is 
currently broken in SVN but you are already well aware of this) I think 
we release chaos.net 0.0.2, to make sure people see that things are 
proceeding quickly in the right direction.

Now, bedtime...
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Johannes Lundberg wrote:

Hi bro'. :-)

> I'd like this to be combined with some sort of memory-presistance too.
> Kind of a new philosophy for building applications. Instead of writing
> applications that create everything (memory-wise) from scratch
> everytime you start the application (like reading the configuration
> file, loading icons etc), you do the setup once and then just resume
> from a post-setup state when a user starts the application. I talked
> quite a lot with Per about this a year ago or so. If you do an strace
> of a small Linux shell utility, there is a lot going on under the hood
> that could be done a more effective manner.

I remember this and I definitely think it's something that ought to be 
considered further. There might be disadvantages with that approach but 
if we can make it work, we can probably have applications launching 
much, much faster on chaos than on any existing operating system in use 
today - which is good. I think Windows XP bootup on my machine is too 
slow, for example, and part of the reason is that all the startup 
applications need to be ready before you can do much anything.
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

You should subscribe to the svn-list so you can see that we are 
constantly checking in new stuff. :)

Johannes Lundberg skrev:
> On 3/22/07, Henrik Hallin-M1 <he...@ca...> wrote:
>> The 0.0.1 release is really outdated though. :)
>>
>> You should try the latest stuff in SVN...
> 
> Ah, cool. The updates you wrote about earlier today? I will do that
> when I get back from work.

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

On 3/22/07, Henrik Hallin-M1 <he...@ca...> wrote:
> The 0.0.1 release is really outdated though. :)
>
> You should try the latest stuff in SVN...

Ah, cool. The updates you wrote about earlier today? I will do that
when I get back from work.

The 0.0.1 release is really outdated though. :)

You should try the latest stuff in SVN...

Johannes Lundberg skrev:
> Good work so far! Just tested the 0.0.1-release.
> 
> On 3/22/07, Henrik Hallin-UU <he...@ca...> wrote:
>> What we can start doing now is to implement a real shell (Cluido). This
>> ought to easy debugging of servers. Anyone up for the task?
> 
> I'll try to spend some time on this.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

Good work so far! Just tested the 0.0.1-release.

On 3/22/07, Henrik Hallin-UU <he...@ca...> wrote:
> What we can start doing now is to implement a real shell (Cluido). This
> ought to easy debugging of servers. Anyone up for the task?

I'll try to spend some time on this.

 On 3/15/07, Henrik Hallin-M1 <he...@ca...> wrote:
> That sounds basically like Windows. I can easily create a VB script that
> gets a running Word application, creates a new document, inserts some
> text and images and does whatever else you can possibly do with Word.
> For you who don't know, a VB script is just a text file with some VB
> scripting in it. (VB script is not the same as Visual Basic) I can then
> just double click that file in explorer (if it is named *.vbs). I could
> alternatively execute it from the command line using "start myscript.vbs".

Sounds kind of cool. I was thinking of doing this on a bigger scale
though, with a lot more of the applications internals available to
other applications. Well, this might not be what we should aim for at
the moment, but maybe with a future version of Tornado or chaos.

I'd like this to be combined with some sort of memory-presistance too.
Kind of a new philosophy for building applications. Instead of writing
applications that create everything (memory-wise) from scratch
everytime you start the application (like reading the configuration
file, loading icons etc), you do the setup once and then just resume
from a post-setup state when a user starts the application. I talked
quite a lot with Per about this a year ago or so. If you do an strace
of a small Linux shell utility, there is a lot going on under the hood
that could be done a more effective manner.

Regards,
  Johannes Lundberg

Hi,

What we can start doing now is to implement a real shell (Cluido). This 
ought to easy debugging of servers. Anyone up for the task?

Also, it would be really interesting to start hacking at a tornado 
server. Some of the console related stuff needed by tornado is already 
there. I/someone only need to implement mouse and keyboard passing from 
the console server. This ought to be fairly simple and shouldn't take 
more than a couple of hours.

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

Hi,

I've reengineered most parts of chaos.net. Feel free to have a look at 
the current stuff and comment please. We need to start working in 
concepts like protocol version control (schemas) and security before 
going any further.

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

Hi guys,

After some days of fairly intensive hacking evenings, we are proud to 
release the first "version" of chaos.net (the re-engineered chaos using 
the .NET architecture, written in C#). Eventually, this system will be 
self-hosted on top of the storm kernel, but until we are ready for that, 
we will develop the system as a set of applications communicating with a 
fake kernel (Storm.NET) running as a user process on top of the .NET 
runtime.

Get it at http://prdownloads.sf.net/chaos/chaos.net-0.0.1.zip (source) 
or http://prdownloads.sf.net/chaos/chaos.net-0.0.1-bin.zip (binary)

Swedish mirror:
http://chaos.lundcom.se/download/chaos.net-0.0.1.zip
http://chaos.lundcom.se/download/chaos.net-0.0.1-bin.zip
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Per Lundberg wrote:

Ah! I finally found out how to disable HTML email sending... what a 
relief. :-) (either I've stupidly configured Thunderbird to use it or it 
simply uses it as default in the 2.0 beta I'm running)

> Henrik or me will "finish" this shortly. :)

Henrik worked a bit more on this today (implementing text drawing etc in 
the Server.Console). What I've done tonight is fixed IPC between Cluido 
and Server.Console (including the necessary ServiceLookup code in 
Storm.NET). Cluido can now successfully IPC with Server.Console and 
print a message to Server.Console's console => a great step forward 
towards a working system!

I think we should release this as Chaos.NET 0.0.1 now and put the 
release up on SourceForge. If no-one objects, I'll probably do that 
tomorrow.
-- 
"stormG3 is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Henrik Hallin-UU wrote:

Hi Henrik,

> Note that none of this actually works, but I am halvway there already. 
> It would be nice if you could have a look at the code so far and see 
> what you think. We should try to work in schema and security support as 
> soon as possible so that stuff isn't left behind.
>   

Great work man! Your work with serializing the data over the TCP socket 
was cool, there were some bugs but I've fixed them so it seems to work 
now. I've just commited a bunch of changes including this plus lots of 
other things. Quoting my commit message:

Checking in after a good Friday night of hacking. :-)
Changes are too many to mention but what I've done is continued on Henrik's
excellent work. Creating services now work and Storm.NET adds them to an
internal data structure. Being able to connect to these services and invoke
methods is under way but unfinished. The concept I've chosen is to let each
service handler create a new TCP socket which service clients will then
connect to to be able to invoke methods on the service.

Henrik or me will "finish" this shortly. :)

> Have a nice weekend
>   

You too! If we continue with this pace, I think we will have some 
working at the end of the weekend. I'll have some other things to take 
care of at home but if things turn out well, I might be able to code 
some more.

-- 
"Linux is obsolete"

Best regards,
Per Lundberg

So. How compatible will this be with Windows CE .NET/.NET Compact Framework=
? ;-)


On 3/16/07, Henrik Hallin-UU <he...@ca...> wrote:
> I will check in a large chunk of code later today. I've been working on
> getting an initial attempt at the IPC mechanism working. This includes
> Storm.NET which sits in the middle and manages all services and
> connections together with a library (Chaos.Service) that will make it
> easy to write servers and applications. This will probably be working
> within a few days. After that, people are welcome to write server, write
> applications or rewrite what I have just written. :)
>
> Henrik
>
> Per Lundberg skrev:
> > Per Lundberg wrote:
> >> I think this is an excellent idea, Henrik! Good work. [...]
> >>
> > Hey, what's the matter with you people??? Where's the stunning response=
?
> > :-) Come on now, we're gonna take the world with storm again (pun
> > intended) and this time, it'll be a lot easier to get the project to a
> > thrilling point where it looks much more like a real operating system
> > than the old chaos ever came to.
> >
> > So, please show some enthusiasm now. :-)
> >
>
> --
> Henrik Hallin
> Casper Minisystem AB
> Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
> Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT
> Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share y=
our
> opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash
> http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=3Djoin.php&p=3Dsourceforge&CID=3D=
DEVDEV
> _______________________________________________
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>


--=20
6accd=E613eff7i319n4o4qrr4s8t12ux

Hi guys,

I've created a basic framework built using C# on .NET now to start 
trying out all the concepts we have talked about. There are several 
components:

Storm.NET
This is the hosted "kernel". It will be responsible for keeping track of 
services and connections between applications and servers (and server to 
server). This is partly done. It probably needs another afternoon until 
it does something useful though.

Chaos.IPC
This is a library implementing the message passing stuff between 
applications. The same mechanism as is used to talk between chaos 
applications and servers is used by Chaos.Service to talk to Storm.NET.

Chaos.Service
This implements some service related functionality on top of which one 
can implement specific libraries such as Chaos.Filesystem, 
Chaos.Networking etc.

Server.Console
This is a .NET service emulating a real chaos service. It implements a 
screen (or several) on which to draw stuff and also handles keyboard and 
mouse input.

Cluido
This is an application that only references Chaos.Service. For starters 
I will use this as a test bed when developing the IPC stuff. Eventually 
this should grow into a shell application.

Note that none of this actually works, but I am halvway there already. 
It would be nice if you could have a look at the code so far and see 
what you think. We should try to work in schema and security support as 
soon as possible so that stuff isn't left behind.

Have a nice weekend

-- 
Henrik Hallin
Casper Minisystem AB
Tel. kontor: 018-10 00 18
Tel. direkt: 0707-958 959

> Per Lundberg wrote:
>> I think this is an excellent idea, Henrik! Good work. [...]
>>
> Hey, what's the matter with you people??? Where's the stunning  
> response?
> :-) Come on now, we're gonna take the world with storm again (pun
> intended) and this time, it'll be a lot easier to get the project to a
> thrilling point where it looks much more like a real operating system
> than the old chaos ever came to.
>
> So, please show some enthusiasm now. :-)

*does the wave*

ALL HAIL chaos!

/ d