Architecture
Caveat
If, from reading these notes, you conclude that I am off my rocker, you won’t be the first, and you may even be right.
No doubt there is a dozen and one reasons why none of this would ever work, but perhaps somewhere deep down there is a tiny fragment that could be used for something.
Contents
Overview
The intention behind Cy/VOS was for a microkernel system. For this reason, the message passing implementation is important.
No form of POSIX compliance is anticipated, as there is no intention to keep such old ideas alive.
Note that some of the architecture, such as implied inherited file permissions, Layer Config etc. may not perform well on a computer with a mechanical hard disk drive. Solid-state disks were not available at the time that some of these ideas were conceived, but they are now widespread. Although there are a great deal of HDD-based computers in circulation, and although there is a need (if only in terms of environmental with regards the electronic waste of fully-working computers deemed “obsolete”) to have a decent operating system on which old computers can remain functional, the system described here is not intended for that purpose. With that said, older computers are all capable of taking an SSD so long as they support SATA drives, and RAM upgrades are also cost-effective, so the focus here is on a high-quality architecture rather than peak performance on old hardware. The only resource that must be treated with care is CPU time, as CPU performance improvement has massively stagnated. One workaround to this is to introduce parallelism where possible, i.e. attempt to divide CPU-intensive workloads into threads, as multi-core CPUs have been standard for many years now.