Chinese entertainment for engineering students

Wang Fei ran to play cards again. It was at the small gathering place next door, which was really not that far away. Today is Saturday, and Wang Fei and the other little sisters are gathering together for a rare occasion. They are drinking and having fun, and the music is playing loudly.

The room was quite large, enough for them to deal with. During the decoration, a lot of sound insulation was considered, so Wang Xu was not disturbed much.

Wang Xu himself is leisurely writing some software plans, from mathematics software to three-dimensional engines, and various software plans.

In terms of hardware, Wang Xu really had no choice. The equipment required for that thing was too many and too complex, so he could only figure it out slowly.

But in terms of software, it is still possible to overtake. You don’t need to take any curves, you can overtake directly on the straight.

Software problems, especially the first version of software, are generally not a development problem, but a commercial operation problem.

DOS is not the best operating system, but it is the most successful commercial operating system.

Therefore, it can be continuously improved and eventually defeat countless competitors and become the dominant operating system.

Wang Xu has no intention of taking the desktop system route. No one can beat the Wintel alliance in this route. In this era, it is an unbreakable alliance.

Therefore, he could only find another way and take the path of servers and workstations.

At least in the 1990s, servers and workstations were still dominated by Unix.

Unix is ​​not a unified operating system, but a general name for a series of operating systems.

In fact, the Unix versions of various companies are not fully compatible, and it is quite troublesome to transplant software between each other. Wang Xu took the path of Linux.

In 1983, Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) with the goal of creating a completely free Unix-like operating system.

In this project, Stallman and other volunteers developed the GNU tool chain (GCC, GDB, GNU Make, etc.), but the operating system kernel was never completed.

Linux is a self-entertainment work created a year ago by Linus Torvalds, a talented student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

It is actually an exercise based on the GNU tool chain. At the beginning, it only covered the basic kernel and IO parts, which was quite imperfect.

But as a genius, Linus's ideas were quite advanced. The microkernel he proposed was a new operating system concept that was replaceable and everything else was external applications, making this operating system stand out from many other projects.

Later, he open sourced the kernel on the Internet and opened it to the world. He also explained his development philosophy in the attached document.

And allows anyone to modify and publish it, and it also breaks out of the past free software framework that did not allow commercial operations, and allows this operating system to operate commercially for the first time.

Free, commercially available, and with advanced concepts, this operating system has quickly been recognized by countless programmers, and they have actively participated in the modification and update of this operating system.

As programmers from all over the world joined in, this operating system had the first version of a stable kernel.

Probably this year, maybe already, the first release version of Linux will be packaged by a programmer named Patrick Wolf, and since then Linux has been on the right track.

However, China is not yet connected to the Internet, so Wang Xu cannot obtain the source code of Linux at all, and Wang Xu really doesn't like the current version of Linux.

Apart from the advanced concept, there is nothing particularly outstanding about the code itself.

Wang Xu's operating system plan actually came earlier than Linux. It was the earliest software product invested in research and development in the supercomputing project. As early as the end of last year, young teachers were already involved in development.

At present, it is only an adaptation for Intel series chips, and it can only support a few graphics cards and display modes, and the support for various peripherals is very limited.

Of course, this is enough. After all, most of Shuimu's internal computers are purchased in bulk, and only a few types of graphics cards are needed.

The system is still unable to call multiple external GPUs to realize Wang Xu’s original supercomputing dream.

However, it is simple, only supports PC stand-alone, only has a command line, and has no applications. It even has countless bugs in the first development version, which already appeared in March.

Wang Xu looked down on this thing a little bit, so he didn't make any noise or promote it with great fanfare. Although Professor Yan wanted to give it a try, Wang Xu persuaded him to wait a moment. Anyway, the complete body is not far away. Wait a minute. Okay, let's blow it together.

However, publicity or not, China's first real desktop operating system appeared so quietly.

Without naming it after any mythical beast, Wang Xu simply named it Cos, the abbreviation of Chinese OS.

Well, that’s right, the Chinese operating system, although the first version does not yet support Chinese, is based on 32-bit underlying logic, allowing it to easily expand support for various texts.

Of course, you can also understand it as the Chinese operating system.

This operating system now only has some basic functions that can be booted, and some small tools have been transplanted for development. It doesn't even have basic network connection functions. The reason is that the corresponding network program has not been developed yet.

Wang Xu directly skipped the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, and the kernel was directly 32-bit. As a result, the development of this product can only complete final debugging and testing on machines above 80386.

In order to solve this problem, Wang Xu racked his brains to come up with a compatibility mode so that 16-bit computers can also run this operating system.

But the speed is really beyond praise. Apart from experiencing it, there is really no practical use.

However, development can still be completed on old machines. After all, GNU itself can adapt to 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit compilation modes. Just change the parameters during compilation.

This project has been very difficult from the very beginning, both for teachers and students. After all, no one in China has actually worked on an operating system.

Even the teacher who wrote the operating system textbook only knew the theory and had never actually implemented an operating system. You can imagine the tediousness and trouble involved.

That is to say, Wang Xu's project plan was written in enough detail, and he even solved many difficult problems by himself, so that the first version of Cos could be successfully born.

What's more, at the beginning, all development could only be done on the DOS operating system, not even Unix.

Then use simple editing tools to develop something that cannot be executed on DOS at all. You will know how cumbersome it is if you think about it.

However, with the official completion of the first version of Cos, the development work is on the right track. Finally, teachers and students who have been working hard for a long time can finally develop and debug on a machine.

This is all thanks to some commonly used Unix tools, which have been ported, such as cat, grep and the like.

In fact, the source code of these things can be found. Senior brothers who studied abroad have brought them back early, without Wang Xu even needing to take action.

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(See you tomorrow)