Nina Kalinina2d ago

So, this weekend I'm playing with Fiwix. Fiwix (https://fiwix.org/) is a small hobbyist operating system for i386 that aims to be Linux 2.0 compatible while being small enough that a single human could understand it as a whole (it's ~30k SLOC, self-hosted, and can be built with tcc).

A couple of years ago Fiwix was used in a fun project of "let's bootstrap a Linux system with only tiny tools that can be understood by a single person": https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst

My refreshed interest in it comes from multiple sources: first, there is now a TCP/IP stack (still WIP). Second, GNU/Linux is *gestures ambiguously* in a strange state, so it is interesting to see how far one could get with a completely non-BSD non-standard tiny, toy-like operating system.

The installation is quite straightforward. "Please keep in mind this kernel is not yet suited for production. Use at your own risk!" is, in itself, a proof of reliability.

This is a beginning of a slow-going🧵

Show threadNina Kalinina2d ago

FiwixOS comes with quite a few ports, and will require close to 1GB on a disk. I suppose this is because the packages are not particularly optimised in size. The biggest packages beyond the base and GCC are Python3, Perl, ZX Spectrum emulator and Doom/Heretic.

Also, look at this Halt message, so cute!

The system is small, but functional. At the same time, there are quite a few sharp corners, unfinished and untested things.

The list of packages/ports is small, so I want to bring a few things in. Is it going to be easy? Let's find out!

🧵 cont

Show threadNina Kalinina2d ago

The first fun challenge is exchanging files with Fiwix. You see, Fiwix only supports ext2 (3?), Minix, and ISO9600 (CD drives).

My daily driver is (still) MacOS, so I cannot just mount the ext2 partition to send files over. I can create an ISO image with the files, but this is a one-way trip. Would be nice to add the support for FAT16/32 disks to Fiwix, right?

Well! First, I simply created a new CD image with mtools-4.0.49.tar.gz. Fiwix recognised the CD, and I was able to unpack mtools archive. Then I ran `configure`, and then edited a few things here and there (mostly mis-configurations in the config file). Then I ran `make`, and few minutes later I got myself a working set of tools to access FAT-formatted disks. Now I can copy files between Fiwix and MacOS, neat.

🧵 cont

Show threadKirtai 🏳️‍⚧️
@nina_kali_nina
Hmm, I wonder if Fiwix has 9P support. It would make working in a VM easier (QEMU supports 9P for shared folders)
Apr 4 at 9:51pmWeb
Show threadNina Kalinina1d ago
@kirtai I seriously doubt that :) but if it can be compiled with C in userland, it can be done
Show threadKirtai 🏳️‍⚧️1d ago
@nina_kali_nina
It was worth a shot