Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
QEMU Advent Calendar (qemu-advent-calendar.org)
239 points by jf on Dec 6, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments



Heya!

Thomas Huth, and myself are organizing the 2016 edition. We still have a couple of slots left, so don't hesitate to contact[1] if you have a cool disk image (or two) to contribute!

Edit: Check out the original announcement[2] by Thomas about disk image requirements.

[1] http://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2016/#contact

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-09/msg039...


A relative new Real Time Operating Systems called Zephyr[1].

[1] https://www.zephyrproject.org/.


This is awesome!

I would love to see a qemu image for any of the following:

1. E2 (Erlang OS)

2. TempleOS

3. That new OS Google is supposedly working on


squeak/pharo

Corman Lisp/Clozure CL/SBCL Common Lisp Interface Manager https://github.com/robert-strandh/McCLIM

meta emu: b-em/atomulator/elkulator/rpcemuspoon/ep128/amstrad cpc/fuse/stella/atari800/hatari/vice/uae/apple II/kegs/basilisk/sheepshaver/vmac/psx/pcsx/mess/EACA Video Genie etc. A lot has compatible FLOSS ROMs included.

sky is the limit: Stellarium


Thanks for the nice suggestions!


This was done back in 2014 (with different images), and was a super success.. making it easy for people to try software they wouldn't normally have...

Check out the one from 2014: http://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2014/


Indeed, major kudos to Stefan Hajnoczi, who organised it alone and did a stellar job in 2014!


Thank you for compiling this set of OS images. Being always on the lookout for obscure and non-mainstream OS I was pleased to find a few more and possibly even more in the days to come.

It was always fun to see MnuetOS run a very usable GUI with comprehensive programs all from a single floppy drive back in the days.

For me the above routine has now been replicated by booting macOS, starting VirtualBox Ubuntu VM and installing QEMU inside the VM just to see it boot MenuetOS even faster than bare metal boot ever did.


Glad that it worked for you. We realised a bit late that mouse was behaving rather oddly inside MenuetOS (at least on my Fedora 24 machine). We were seeing three behaviours: 1) mouse works fine; 2) mouse does not move at all (but you see it); and 3) mouse moves automatically to the right-most border at the start and stays there -- sometimes for ever, sometimes just for a while.

Adding the '-usb -device usb-tablet' to the QEMU command-line gave an impression that it's the cause, by working once, but it quickly reverts to either behaviour 2 or 3 above.


I wonder if they'll feature TempleOS at one point...

It would be appropriate, especially considering its biblical references :}

[1] http://www.templeos.org/


For the uninitiated, TempleOS (formerly LoseTheOS) is the work of programmer Terry S Davis, who went schizophrenic. He hangs out on HN, mostly blabbing nonsense, racial slurs, or conspiracy theories, but the rare times he's lucid can be very interesting. More info about him:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

He was shadowbanned, though, because it just wasn't worth putting up with the shit. See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823


Terry Davis' crazy is actually pretty easy to understand. He believes that God exists. However, the word of god is a random sentence generator he created (though he would say god willed him to do it). This means he is following the will of an RNG. If he's not trolling (look how long Andy Kauffman would hold a gag), I don't find his zealotry for his version of God much different than other religious zealotry. At least, his schitzophrenia is functional, and it's very interesting to watch software development dictated by an RNG.

There seems to be a correllation between the DSM-IV classification of Aspergers and a predilection to views outside social norms.

if you can get past the blatant and often blinding racism he'd spew on HN, Davis actually had some really interesting insights in his posts. Shame they were all greyed-out.


I looked at the RNG in TempleOS out of curiosity. I assumed he was mixing in some noise sources that could be explained as some kind of universal communication subchannel from god. Here's the relevant code (in HolyC of course):

  I32 RandI32()
  {//Random I32. Xor with TimsStamp.
    sys_rnd_seed.i32[0]=(1664525*sys_rnd_seed.i32[0]+1013904223)^GetTSC>>4;
    return sys_rnd_seed.i32[0];
  }
There are very similar RNG functions for signed and unsigned versions of 16, 32 and 64 bit ints. The GetTSC function just calls RDTSC, combines the two 32-bit halves in EAX and EDX and returns the recombined 64-bit TSC.

So the last returned value is used as part of the seed for the next one. The initial seed is set in kend.cpp:

  sys_rnd_seed  =93186752^GetTSC;
I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that god would be quite so deterministic.


he's now using Donald Knuth's LCG http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Kernel/KMathB.html


God does not throw dice. Apparently, he does use a linear congruential RNG.


Now how does free will come into this?


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/221/


No, not relevant. I wish someone would invent an ad blocker that instead blocked all gratuitous references to xkcd (i.e. all of them)


The God/code part might have some sort of logic to it, but he also likes to go on rants about "the CIA Niggers" that are completely incoherent


If you think it's easy to understand that some people believe in God while others don't you probably aren't curious enough :)


> He hangs out on HN, mostly blabbing nonsense, racial slurs, or conspiracy theories, but the rare times he's lucid can be very interesting.

I don't feel great about highlighting negative sides of somebody who already has genuine difficulty finding understanding despite (presumably) meaning no harm to others. Especially if you think he may be reading this. I took the liberty of flagging this post.


He also does some fascinating videos and sometimes interesting live streams, sometimes multiple times a day, on his YouTube channel...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdX4uJUwSFwiY3XBvu-F_-Q


He went live 30 seconds ago.


Despite the name, I'm sure you're aware that the QEMU Advent Calendar is secular. (I realize you've mentioned it in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner.)


Day 1: MikeOS http://mikeos.sourceforge.net

Day 2: Syllable Desktop http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html

Day 3: FreeGEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeGEM

Day 4: ReactOS https://reactos.org/

Day 5: Tower of Hanoi for Forth/OpenFirmware http://www.kernelthread.com/projects/hanoi/html/macprom.html

Day 6: MenuetOS http://menuetos.net/


My first instinct was to check the predictable URLs for future images and ruin the surprise... luckily they have that covered!


I wonder how many of these could be made to run in the browser now, a-la the Internet Archive.


Hoping for something interesting that isn't x86ish :)


We're hoping, too -- there's some more ground to cover, let's see how it turns out. :-)


Oh, forgot to mention, checkout Day-5 -- it's PowerPC-based.


They did Oberon System one of the previous years, but I don't know if it used the Oberon CPU emulator or an x86 port.


I'm curious - what would a minimal Linux(?) system consist of that starts qemu at the first opportunity?

Perhaps qemu could even replace init?


Related: Checkout the 'supermin'[1]

<verbatim> Supermin is a tool for building supermin appliances. These are tiny appliances (similar to virtual machines), usually around 100KB in size, which get fully instantiated on-the-fly in a fraction of a second when you need to boot one of them. </verbatim>

[1] http://libguestfs.org/supermin.1.html


Most likely booting directly to the Xen hypervisor and running VMs from there.


Have a look at Qubes OS


I don't think qubes comes anywhere close to what the GP was asking for. It's awesome, but it's far from being a minimal linux system to bootstrap qemu. dom0 is a full Fedora install, and it uses Xen.


This is exciting. But I'm already wasting countless hours solving the AoC every day, and I'm backlogged on work. So I'll have to give it a miss for now.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: