Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

KolibriOS

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Developer
  
KolibriOS Project Team

Working state
  
Active

Written in
  
Fasm

Source model
  
Open source

KolibriOS

Latest release
  
0.7.7.0+ Nightly / October 1, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-10-01)

Available in
  
English, Russian, Italian, Spanish

Kolibri or KolibriOS is a small open source x86 operating system written completely in assembly. It was forked off from MenuetOS in 2004 and has run under independent development since.

Contents

In a review piece on alternative operating systems (2009), Tech Radar called it "tremendously impressive" noting its performance and streamlined code-base. Thanks to its small size, scientists announced that they were able to store KolibriOS on a tiny drop of water using synthetic DNA molecules and infer a functional copy without a single error.

Features

  • Pre-emptive multitasking, streams, parallel execution of system calls
  • Boots in few seconds from various devices; NTFS and Ext2/3 also supported. Can be started from Coreboot and Windows (Windows will shut down)
  • Graphical user interface based on and optimized for VESA
  • Development kit: code editor with a macro assembler (FASM) integrated
  • Most distributions will fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy image

    • System requirements

  • i586 compatible CPU required
  • 8 MB of RAM
  • VESA-compatible videocard
  • 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive, hard disk, USB Flash or CD-drive
  • Keyboard and mouse (COM, PS/2 or USB)

    • Supported hardware

  • Hard disks and some USB-sticks. Supported file systems are FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 (long names support), NTFS (partially, read only), ext2/ext3/ext4 (partially, read only), XFS (partially, read only) and CDFS
  • Audio: AC'97 audio codec support for Intel, nForce, nForce2, nForce3, nForce4, SIS7012, FM801, VT8233, VT8233C, VT8235, VT8237, VT8237R, VT8237R Plus and EMU10K1X chipsets
  • Audio: Intel High Definition Audio support for certain motherboards
  • Video: AMD, ATI and Intel chipsets

    • Development branches

  • KolibriACPI: extended ACPI support
  • KolibriNET: extended network support
  • Kolibri-A: Exokernel version of KolibriOS optimized for embedded applications and hardware engineering; only few AMD APU-based platforms are currently supported.

    • References

    KolibriOS Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA