There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
It only exists in my mind yet, so I can't say anything final yet.
Definitely not. There are already enough Unix clones.
I'll design a language for it first.
Yes, instead data will be kept in processes in their own address space (like variables). I might implement a general purpose filesystem process, but it will in no way be internal to the OS. Users would be able to use their own filesystem processes if they desire, and new filesystem processes may be created any time.
Processes will survive reboots. They will be paged to disk in the way they're paged to disk when the system runs out of main memory, and when the system comes up after a reboot the previous state of the processes will be restored.
That's done the same way as an OS with a filesystem would prevent loss of data in filesystem buffers: Memory pages with modified data are written to disk regularly, so only modifications newer than the latest synchronization are lost. The OS will have a mechanism to recover a consistent state from the data on disk.
Yes, of course backups will be possible. The backup tool will collect all pages, no matter whether they're currently in main memory or paged to disk, and write them to the backup media.
Yes, disks will only be used for paging, everything will look like ram.
Originally (years ago) the OS was planned for a non-networked machine. Networking will have to be done some way, but I don't know yet how.
It's not an acronym, and it's not a pun on Sun Microsystems either. Moon really has no secret meaning, I just liked the word.
Security is one of the points I want to emphasize. Moon will have mandatory access control built in from the very start. That might make it more difficult to use, but I consider it a must. I hope to keep the system usable by making the security module very configurable.
See the page on security in Moon.
Back to the main page.
Page created: Jun 30, 1997 -
last update: Nov 26, 2002 -
version 2.1
Jörg Czeranski (Impressum)