Popcorn: another UEFI research OS

January 7, 2017 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

The list of UEFI research OSes has grown by one. Justin Miller has created Popcorn:

popcorn: A toy microkernel x64 UEFI OS: popcorn is a hobby OS for x64 UEFI environments to play with building a microkenerl architecture. It’s far from finished, or even being usable – for now, it’s a sandbox for me to explore the UEFI architecture, microkernels, and OS-related concepts that I want to play with.

https://github.com/justinian/popcorn

With Popcorn, that makes about 7 that I’ve seen (and I’m not watching academic news sources, where others may be hanging out). Here’s the other ones I’m aware of:

UEFI-OS

new EFI-based operating systems

UEFI-OS

December 26, 2016 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

There’s a handful of research OSes written for UEFI:

new EFI-based operating systems

Now there’s one more:

https://github.com/queer/uefi-os

Granted, it’s probably the smallest one yet, merely a hello-world program.

new EFI-based operating systems

August 28, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ 1 Comment

EFI started as a boot loader solution for Intel Itanium systems. It has grown into UEFI, a boot loader solution for multiple architectures.

However, in my opinion, UEFI is an operating system. It has driver, service, and app models. If you don’t load another OS (eg, Windows, Linux) , and stay in UEFI, the UEFI Shell is pretty much like early MS-DOS: a shell, a bunch of command line tools, and a handful of full-screen tools (edit, hexedit). UEFI is called “the new DOS” for a reason… MS-DOS didn’t have Python either. The main thing missing is an EFI equivalent to DEBUG.COM. 🙂

Now there are a handful of new UEFI-centric OSes being created. It appears they’re mostly hobbyist, educational projects. There may be others, these are the only ones I know of so far:

https://github.com/kmmoore/mosquitos
https://github.com/whisper-bye/LuminOS
https://github.com/nerdshark/simplix
https://github.com/segfo/myOSwithUEFI
https://github.com/skylerseverns/elementary-os-freya-uefi

I look forward to future academic research in this area. I am wondering if there are any existing hardware vendors who’re using UEFI as the only software stack, not using other embedded OSes? Someone needs to do some performance testing to see how it compares to eLinux/Android/NanoBSD/etc.