The Thix OS

Team

Overview

The Thix OS kernel was written by Tudor Hulubei from the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest in Romania at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the late 90s. The result is a new POSIX (IEEE Std 1003.1-1988) compliant UNIX kernel with many features "real" operating systems have: process management, virtual memory, demand paging, protection, swapping, filesystem, I/O, ...
Thix is a monolithic kernel, has been developed under Linux with gcc and is distributed under the GNU Public Licence. The status of his project up to now is (taken from his Thix project website http://hulubei.net/tudor/thix/):
The Thix Operating System is fully functional at this time. Many free software packages have been succesfully compiled/run under it, including development tools such as the GNU C/C++ Compiler suite. However, there is no networking support and the only drivers available are for floppy disks, (E)IDE hard disks, printers, virtual terminals, mem, kmem and null.

Motivation

During our search for an non-well known (makes the whole thing more unique and interesting) operating system we came across the Thix OS that meets our (naturally the course ones too) requirements. It seems to be a good structured and full functional tight Unix related open source operating system with well documented C source code what will make an extensive inspection much more comfortable. Additionally we have the intention to run it on an old x86 machine to also perform the investigated topics practically. And because it is possible to run a lot of free software on it, we are looking forward to try them out and understand the interaction with the chosen OS. Additionally to the "standard" investigation we try to point out special features as well as weaknesses too.
Many of the other possible candidates did not seem as professional as Thix, so the decision came to Tudor Hulubei's Thix OS. It is possible that it is not perfect but that makes the review more exciting than investigating a well-established huge OS.

Review

The following uploads are the final products of our THIX OS review (paper in German as PDF):


Presentation, January 20

Final THIX OS Review

References

For the whole sources and additonal information we refer to the Thix project website: