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Packing a lot of punch into a small package
Menuet is a small multitasking real-- time operating system with a graphical user interface; see Figure 1. Written entirely in x86 32-- bit assembly language, I designed Menuet to fit on a single 1.44-MB floppy diskette, requiring only an 80386 (or greater) CPU, 32 MB of RAM, and mouse. Menuet provides protection for memory and code, runs at 16 million colors and at 44.1-KHz sound, and currently supports the Fat12 and Fat32 filesystems. Menuet is freely available at http://www.mnuetos.org/ and from DDJ (see "Resource Center," page 57 and distributed under the GPL. The system includes a 32-bit assembler, text editor application, demos, and other relevant information.
Among my design principles is the belief that the more complex an operating system is, the more likely it is to have bugs. That's why most of Menuet's functions are implemented as in a monolithic kernel, rather than a microkernel (see Figure 2). And since complexity can lead to poor performance, another of my goals with Menuet was...