Progress and whatnot

Those who really know me, i.e. my precious Julie, know that when I find something I find funny I do it. A lot.

So for the last few days I've been totally focused on Cosmos, and have made some significant changes dare I say. The network driver for RTL 8139 became stable enough to send proper packets the other day. Yey!

Today I added support for VMWare Server (since we only had VMWare Workstation from before). The VMW Server hasn't got an RTL network card, so for now we are only able to send networkpackets from Qemu and physical machines with RTL NIC's.

Oh, did I mention that the RTL can't receive packets yet? A mono-NIC if you will. Once I understand IRQ's in Cosmos (and we get that darn "Invalid Opcode" bug out of the way) we can hopefully get a fully functional network card.

It would be awesome if we could get two Cosmos machines talking to each other before Chad goes to Egypt to present Cosmos at Microsoft Egypt's EDC, Egyptian Developers Conference in April.

Mention on the Cosmos blog

The Cosmos project has a blog - and darnit - I got my 15 minutes of fame.

For those of you who doesn't yet know what Cosmos is it's a framework for writing Operating Systems in C#. Within minutes you can have your own custom operating system up and running. The C# code you write is converted into IL by Visual Studio, and then converted to Assembly/Machine code by Cosmos.

Today Chad "Kudzu" Hower, a Microsoft MVP and one of the founders of the Cosmos project, implemented USB support. That means that you build directly from Visual Studio 2008 onto a USB memorystick, and then you can boot your Operating System directly from the memorystick.

Network support is still more unstable than a cow balancing on a 15 feet pole stacked on a football, but still...

Network packet sent from Cosmos

I've been working on network support in Cosmos for some days now, and actually got a breakthrough this evening. A packet, although with invalid data, has been sent onto a virtual network!

Here is a screenshot of Wireshark (former Ethereal) which sniffs a packet from a virtual TAP -WIN32 networkcard connected together with Cosmos' RTL8139C+ NIC.


The next step is to get correct data to be sent, and also to receive packets.

Cosmos - an interesting place to be

Like before I've discovered new and interesting things through the blog of Scott Hanselman. This time I've stumbled over Cosmos - an operating system written in C#.

I've been fascinated with creating OS's for several years. Back in 2004, I think it was, I wrote a simple OS in plain C. It didn't really do much except boot and detect some hardware.

Last summer I dabbled a little with the ReactOS operating system, and made some small sourcecode contributions there. That was C/C++, and unfortunately those are languages I'm not fluent in, so the development just progressed to slowly.

Now though I've found Cosmos which lets me use my favorite language, C#. Yey!

My goal is to create Network support in Cosmos. I've been working on a driver for the RTL8139 chipset for a few days now. Since I have a background in electronics I really love working in the sweet spot just between software and hardware. Working out bits and bytes, and addressranges and memoryareas. Bitfiddling and bitwise mathematics. Good fun!