Kid operating system
Kid Operating System (KOS) is a project that aims to develop an operating system for educational purposes. It is licensed under the GPL. It runs on x86 architecture.
The project was started by a group of young French students in June 1998. They wanted to develop their programming skills by developing their own small operating system. Inexperience played a major role in advancing the development, which was relatively slow to begin with.
History of the KOS Project
- June 1998: Creation of the project by Dimitri Ara''andThomas''Petazzoni
- End 1998: A mini operating system starts
- April 1999: Arrival of Julien Munier'''', a major project. Call for contribution.
- In late 1999 and early 2000: Two physical meetings between developers, leading to a mini system with very limited functionality (no memory management, no multitasking)
- August 2000: Complete overhaul of the system
- From: constant work on this second version of the system
A more complete history of the project 1 is available on their website.
Goals of the KOS Project
The project's goal is not to obtain as soon as possible a functional operating system and supposed to compete with other free and proprietary systems. The purpose is purely educational and pedagogical. For developers, this project is an opportunity to learn the low-level programming, to understand the inner workings of an operating system and architecture of a computer, learn to work in groups and tools for collaborative work. For others, the project brings KOS documents, a bibliography and source code available under GPL.
Simple Operating System
A derivation from KOS is SOS, or Simple Operating System. The objective of this project is to show, step by step to achieve a small operating system. Each step leads to an article published in a monthly magazine and is accompanied with the associated code.
External Links
fr:Kid Operating System