Solar_OS Concepts

Those are the main concepts behind Solar_OS:

• Really simple inside and simple outside
• Easy to understand and highly organized
• Small, Fast, RealTime
• Has minimal hardware requirements
• Fast standard GUI: windows inside windows inside windows, event driven.
• Fully ASM OS
• Provides a clean, small, simple and very fast to boot OS with the typical features of a GUI desktop OS.

Solar_OS Features

Solar_OS is a "verifiable OS"

• This means it can start and run from read only media without any filesystem activity and offers a safe starting point.

Solar_OS is Small

• Kernel code including applications and GUI without data is under 512K.
• Code reusability at maximum: app code is really shared by multiple instances.
• Designed to be fully re-entrant.

Solar_OS is Simple

• Easy to develop applications for it and understand the inner workings.
• It has the most simple "Hello World" GUI application including move,resize,minimize, anchor and translucent show contents while drawing... in 35 bytes (uncompressed)
• Makes hardware testing and device driver developing very easy.
• Has a STDCALL API, it is not using INTxx or register based parameters.

Solar_OS is Fast

• SOL_OS is fully programmed in ASM
• Cooperative multitasking is fast and simple
• Architecture assures best response times and very low latency
• Maintains good cache coherency and code localizations in cache.
• It is very Stable and will not reset after years of running
• When needed reboots under a few secconds (2-3s usually w/o BIOS POST)
• Has Warm restart under 1/10s

Solar_OS is Realtime

• Your commands and data aquisitions will be executed very fast and predictable.
• Kernel queues allow very low latency operation.
• It has a FPS.

Solar_OS is Embedable

• It can run from read only media without file system activity
• It only needs a pointing device a screen and eventually a keyboard.
• Multiple applications are embeded inside the kernel image

Solar_OS has very low requirements

• Only 8Mbytes RAM (even less)
• P1 class CPU at 266 or even lower
• Can be setup to run with under 2Mbyte RAM with some limitations.

Solar_OS works well under many emulators

This allows testing without changing your PC layout.
Solar_OS was tested and works under:

• Virtual PC
• Bochs
• Vmware
• Qemu

Solar_OS works well on many x86 CPU's

Solar_OS was tested and works under:

• P1 at 133 Mhz non MMX
• P1 at 166 Mhz
• P2 at 266 Mhz
• P2 at 400 Mhz
• P3 at 700 Mhz
• AMD Duron at 800 Mhz
• AMD Thunderbird at 1.3 Ghz
• P4M at 1.8 Ghz
• P4 at 2.8 Ghz
• AMD64 at 3.0 Ghz
• Intel Core2 Duo T7200 at 2.Ghz