FAQ
What is unixlite?
UnixLite 3 is a small free UNIX clone written in c++. It is available with all the source code, which makes it well-suited to classroom or self study by people wanting to learn how an operating system works.
What hardware do I need to run unixlite?
You need an Intel 486 or higher with 4 MB of RAM, an IDE hard disk with 100 MB of free disk space, and an floppy for booting. It is not possible to boot off a hard disk drive (yet). You can go to here to get a ready-to-run demostration.
What's the difference bettwen unixlite and minix?
Both are small unix like operating system and aimed toward education, however, there are some fundmantal difference:
Unixlite's memory management is based on pure paging(same as linux), while minix is based on segmentation. It is very hard to add support for shared library without paging.
Minix is a microkernel based system, while unixlite is a monolithic style system. We don't think microkernel design is inherently superior to monolithic approach.
What's the difference between unixlite and linux?
Compared with the the real operating system such as linux, unixlite is a toy system. UnixLite conforms to linux's application binary interface, and you can view unixlite as the subset of linux.
Why use uClibc not Glibc?
Glibc is too complex and too big, porting glibc to unixlite is not a simple task. On the contrary, uClibc is much smaller than the GNU C Library, but nearly all applications supported by glibc also work perfectly with uClibc. So we choose uClibc.
Is c++ suitable for system programming?
We only use plain c++ functionality: member function, single inheritance, and virtual function. That's enough. We think there is no essential difference between c and c++ without using the following c++ features:
exception handling
multiple inheritence
run time type identification
operator overloading except new and delete
template magic
