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Officially is it the C# Open Source Managed Operating System, but we just go by Cosmos.
In fact, the name Cosmos was chosen before any meaning was attributed to it. Later we decided by chance what the letters stood for. Thus it is also Cosmos, and not COSMOS or CosmOS.
And besides, VBOSMOS sounds stupid.
Yes. Despite C# being in the Cosmos name, any .NET language can be used including Visual Basic.NET, F#, Delphi Chrome and more. In fact, Cosmos will work with any .NET language that compiles to pure IL without P/Invokes. The C# refers to what we use to build Cosmos itself and is simply our personal preference of language.
The user kit supports Visual Studio Express. To build the Dev Kit, Visual Studio Professional or higher must be used. This includes the free Visual Studio Community edition! See How to... Install COSMOS (for VS 2013 Pro Ultimate Express).
Yes. Cosmos runs on real hardware (and you can debug with a serial cable) as well as Vitual PC, HyperV, Virual Box and others. See Deployment. We have Visual Studio integration for running using VMware and bochs.
We supported Mono in the past and will again in the future. Currently Mono support is disabled merely as a way to focus our limited resources as Mono requires a different set of plugs.
Cosmos currently only runs on x86 and x64 processors. It has the capability to run on ARM and other processors as well but currently only Intel is supported.
Users have produced demos that use basic networking and graphics, but the core team is still focused on kernel and debugger. When we have the foundation built to a sufficient level the core team will integrate the work of users into Cosmos itself. To answer your question, Cosmos currently has a working VMware SVGA driver (up to 1920x1200, but only works on VMware) and a non-working-at-the-moment VGA driver (up to 320x200, wow!). Basic networking is being worked on, and our FAT driver is almost ready.
Please see Plugs.
Cosmos is licensed under the New BSD license. Please see License
Some crazy eccentric developers.
Primarily because it's fun. But beyond that, how else can you boot .NET on a floppy or small USB stick? Who else will try to put .NET on the Wii, OLPC, and iPhone?
We are also developing a TCP/IP stack. Imagine instead of deploying half a dozen virtualized OS's, deploying many dozens of dedicated OS's. One that only does DNS, a few that only do HTTP, etc. One instance, one function.
World domination of course, but until we achieve that our goals are:
- A reliable OS which never hangs (of course until hardware fails). Whichever program crashes, the OS should never hang or go unresponsive.
- Very safe (safe in the sense which is free from buffer overflows, heap overflows, exploits etc.)
- Drivers and programs being able to be verifiable/tested. Even the Kernel should be verifiable at a later stage (maybe using TALx86)
- The LINUX of tomorrow.
Cosmos and Singularity have a lot in common. Singularity however is only a research project to determine usefulness of pieces that might later be used in .NET and or future versions of Windows. Singularity itself is not intended to ship as a Microsoft supported operating system. In March 2008 Singularity was released to the public on CodePlex. However the license is for academic use only and thus differs greatly from the goals of Cosmos. Developers of Cosmos should not look at Singularity source to avoid contaminating Cosmos and violating the Singularity license.
If you have looked at Singularity the past, you are welcome to develop on Cosmos however you must be careful not to use your knowledge of Singularity. Unless you were involved deeply into Singularity code this will likely not be a problem. If you are concerned about this, choose purposefully to develop in a different area of functionality in Cosmos.
The .NET Micro Framework targets tiny devices and is interpreted. Cosmos targets both large and low resource machines and is compiled.
Yes. Many of the developers on the team are using 64-bit Windows.
Currently we only support Visual Studio 2015 Pro/Ultimate/Community. Older versions, such as Milestone 4, do support Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is free and support is being developed/tested so there is not need to support Visual Studio 2010/2013 further.
Console apps mostly for now. When we have more of the foundational pieces we will move to graphics.
The dev kit is the source code for Cosmos. You can download it from the Source Code tab to take a look or even install it. See [Devkit] for information on how to install it. Keep in mind the latest Dev Kit contains the latest code, which may be unstable or untested. If you don't like hunting for bugs, take a look at the Dev Kits listed on the Releases page.
The goal is that Cosmos developers will never need to write assembly language. However a few of us working in the compiler and debugger areas must work with assembly language. To ease our task we have developed a HLA (High level assembler) which uses a language called X#.
See this page.
