onie VS toaruos

The S41XXY-ON switches do have some complexity in the bootloader; If I recall correctly it has an "A" and "B" OS so you can update one and instantly reboot to the other if it goes wrong, as well as some ONIE functionality. So updating them is a bit of a process as you have to make sure both get updated at some point - I think they're more designed for big datacenter lights-out deployments where you have the infrastructure to manage updating dozens at a time.

I can assure you that's entirely plausible. There are many big vendors like this, with a rather smaller set of vendors that sell switch chips for them. High end network switches are effectively a commodity now, and often are not much more than a board built around a single chip/chipset, which does everything.

As for software, there are many vendors and open source projects that make complete distributions for these generic switches/chipsets.

One way to get an idea of the sheer number of devices in play here is to look at the hardware supported by ONIE, a small Linux distribution that is a de facto standard bootloader for these. Can't find a proper HCL for ONIE, but have a look at the source: https://github.com/opencomputeproject/onie/tree/master/machi...

Another interesting project to checkout is klange’s toaruos https://github.com/klange/toaruos

In case it's not clear, PonyOS is a joke reskin of my serious OS project, ToaruOS. PonyOS gets a new release every April 1st. All of the libraries and applications in ToaruOS are in-house things I built myself - the whole OS is "built from scratch". PonyOS adds ponysay, which is an external app originally written in Python - and in previous releases of PonyOS I shipped the Python version alongside a port of Python 3.6. This release, though, comes with a port to my own language, Kuroko, which is a dialect of Python - a lot of what went into building the PonyOS release this year was getting ponysay to work well.

There is no correct way to use inline assembly here. You need a stub written in assembly that will save those registers to the stack and pass a pointer to a handler written in C. You may also want to define a struct that matches the stack layout to make it easier to access the stack contents. This is not my code. If you want to use this code in your OS, you must follow the license requirements.

Here's a good example, although it's 64-bit instead of 32-bit.

ToaruOS 2.0\ (5 comments)