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Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs

64 points by SockThief 9 hours ago | 10 comments

> Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for...

A person after my own heart. NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.

jmmv 4 hours ago

I was curious about this a couple of years ago and ended up digging into the history of the NT design, comparing it to contemporary Unix systems, and writing this: https://jmmv.dev/2024/09/windows-nt-vs-unix-design.html . Pretty enlightening exercise.

mvdwoord 2 hours ago

Great read. It reminded me of a talk I attended in Amsterdam by Mark Russinovich.

Windows and Linux: A Tale of Two Kernels - Tech-Ed 2004

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HdV9QuvgS_w

Tuna-Fish 7 hours ago

Too bad for all the horrible misfeatures that got designed in and that we still have to live with, like the entire I/O Manager/Object Manager/filters/driver stack mess, with no caching anywhere above the drivers.

stonogo 5 hours ago

It sure looks a lot like VMS to me...

mesrik 2 hours ago

It does, and for reason I'm assuming many already know why. But if you weren't joking and were living under a rock. Look up the guy, Dave Cutler, who were mostly responsible putting together both.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Youtube has many of his interviews. The Computer History Museum (CHM) two part is perhaps most extensive. Links below to these.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss

phendrenad2 7 hours ago

> None of the substantive code was written by AI.

That is impressive

userbinator 5 hours ago

IMHO this is one of the OSes with the weirdest decisions I've seen on here. I do agree with using PE instead of ELF, as the dynamic linking situation of the latter (and Unix-likes in general) is, to put it bluntly, a horrid mess.

The POSIX functions are split over ucrtbase, iphlpapi, and ws2_32, as on Windows, with anything that Windows doesn't implement put in mnposix.

LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

I used AI to help with the mechanical parts of porting

I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries. It doesn't look like AI is replacing software developers, but rather boosting them quite significantly; there seems to be a lot of activity and new projects I've seen recently from many who aren't even using AI themselves, but must be somehow being inspired by others to do more.

yjftsjthsd-h 5 hours ago

> it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries

TBF, the only missing part of this is that Darling isn't developed enough to run many Darwin programs; otherwise you can have that today by installing WINE+DOSBox+Darling on Linux or your pick of *BSD or illumos. (Well, running *BSD programs on other systems is a weak point, but otherwise.)

maharmstone 4 hours ago

>LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

There's nothing in Moxnox ucrtbase that's not also in Windows ucrtbase. open(), read(), and write() are all POSIX functions in ucrtbase.