alt Hacker NewsYeah, a lot of what defines "operating system" for us nowadays is downstream of having memory isolation.
Not having an MMU puts you more into the territory of DOS than UNIX. There is FreeDOS but I'm pretty sure it's x86-only.
Yeah, a lot of what defines "operating system" for us nowadays is downstream of having memory isolation.
Not having an MMU puts you more into the territory of DOS than UNIX. There is FreeDOS but I'm pretty sure it's x86-only.
Mmm... would beg to differ. I have ported stuff to NOMMU Linux and almost everything worked just as on a "real" Linux. Threads, processes (except only vfork, no fork), networking, priorities, you no name it. DOS gives you almost nothing. It has files.
The one thing different to a regular Linux was that a crash of a program was not "drop into debugger" but "device reboots or halts". That part I don't miss at all.