Dusk OS

Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.

It does so by aggressively prioritizing simplicity at the cost of unorthodox constraints, while also aiming to make operators happy.

Dusk OS innovates by having an "almost C" compiler allowing it to piggy-back on UNIX C code, through a modest porting effort, to reach its goals and stay true to its design constraints with a minimal effort.

The end result is a system that has a very high "power density", high enough to issue a challenge to the conventional software culture.

You can read on for more details, but the impatient among you might prefer taking the Dusk Tour.

NOTE: this contents is also served on a Gopherhole at self.duskos.org on port 70. While this website is hosted on Sourcehut, the Gopherhole is hosted on Dusk itself! In a future not so far from now, the website will become a hollow front and the Gopherhole will become the canonical source of information on Dusk OS.

Status

Can run bare metal on:
- i386 (BIOS or EFI)
- amd64 (EFI)
- ARM
- RISC-V
- m68k
- List of supported targets
Can run at native speed on top of "regular" OSes
Can run as PID 1 on top of a bare Linux kernel
Can read, write, create and boot from FAT12/FAT16 (no FAT32 for now) volumes.
Has an "almost C" compiler which, despite its "almost" qualifier, is capable of compiling quite complex "real world" code.
Very small footprint. Designed to run smoothly on 30 years old machines. Almost anything that has a 32-bit CPU in fact.
Simple and terse. For example, the total lines of code involved in having a fully booted bare metal i386 PC Dusk system running on a FAT16 with a C compiler, i386 assembler and a Grid text editor is less than 6000.
It completely self-hosts on all its targets. That is, a machine running Dusk OS has all the tools necessary to either improve itself or produce a media to run Dusk OS on another machine.
In order to bootstrap itself from something else than itself, it also has a POSIX-compatible VM written in C that is able to generate images for all its targets.
Has more documentation than code.
Licensed under CC0, effectively placing it in the public domain.

Hardware support

Deployment templates: [PC][deploy/pc], [EFI][deploy/efi], [Raspberry Pi][deploy/rpi], [Pine 64][deploy/sunxi/pine64-lts], [Orange Pi][deploy/sunxi/orangepi-pc], [Powerbook 520][deploy/mac68k]
Video: VGA, VESA, RPi FB, EFI GOP, EFI UGA
HID: PS/2, USB keyboard, USB mouse, EFI keyboard, EFI mouse
Serial: PC COM, RPi UART
Network: Realtek 8169, Orange Pi EMAC
Storage: ATA, AHCI, RPi EMMC, EFI blkio, USB mass storage
Bus: PCI, USB
USB controllers: UHCI, EHCI, DWC

Applications

Screenshot

Dusk's console isn't very exciting to look at, but Dusk's port of Oberon, Duskberon, looks pretty good.

Getting Dusk

Before v34, the canonical way to get Dusk OS was through sourcehut's git repository. While the repository is still updated for the time being, the new canonical way of getting Dusk OS is through its Gopherhole at self.duskos.org port 70.

The Gopherhole also allows online browsing of the latest release, including its changelog and documentation.

Becoming a Dusk operator is an involving process. It's possible that you're interested in tasting a bit of Dusk's power before you dive into this wonderful adventure of learning Forth and Dusk. You're in luck, there's the Dusk Tour which doesn't require prior Forth knowledge and allows you to dip your toes in it.

Linking to this website

If you want to link to this website, please use http:// links rather than https:// ones. While http:// links are trivially "upgradable" to HTTPS, the opposite is not.

Right now, this website is hosted on a service (sourcehut pages) that doesn't offer the option of not using SSL, but eventually, it's possible that this website ends up being served by a machine running Dusk OS. In that case, it will not be served under SSL and all https:// links will be broken.