Reviewing September 2024

CloudCheck

The first week of this month was spent wrapping up my work on CloudCheck, a project I've been contemplating since early 2023 to help small teams reduce cloud waste. The MVP and the landing page are complete, but I didn't succeed in finding enough people interested in trying the service or providing feedback.

I tried to work on customer discovery during the previous year, but a failure to make enough progress pushed the project to the back burner. Eventually, I decided to spend up to a month coding it anyway to see what would happen. I confirmed once again that "if you build it, they will come" is not true. However, the time spent on the project was not wasted. I got up to date with the latest Rails version and applied many product ideas I had learned over the past two years.

I found CloudCheck useful for monitoring my servers and reducing my cloud bills, so I'll keep using it and see where it goes. However, I won't invest more time working on it without user feedback.

MOROS

After that, I switched back to MOROS, my hobby operating system written in Rust. In comparison, talking about it and finding people interested is much easier. I worked on many small features to improve it during the month:

• Add /dev/vga/font device (#653)
• Replace base64 command with encode and decode (#654)
• Add kind syscall (#655)
• Update hash command (#656)
• Add diff command (#657)
• Add search to editor (#659)
• Add a line mode to the editor (#660)
• Add chess puzzle (#662)
• Add write --parents option (#664)
• Add pkg command (#663)
• Improve option parsing (#665)
• Add scrollback buffer support (#627)
• Add search to viewer (#666)
• Fix usage of CSI sequences for scrolling the scrollback buffer (#667)
• Fix userspace heap address (#668)
• Improve process code alloc (#669)
• Align cursor after scrolling in the editor (#671)
• Use ptr::copy_nonoverlapping to load binaries (#670)
• Update Rust to nightly-2024-09-01 (#672)
• Add special alloc_error_handler for userspace (#673)
• Fix binary loading (#674)
• Add more restrictive mapping on page fault (#675)
• Enable userspace memory deallocation (#676)
• Copy memory on instruction fetch page fault (#677)
• Add geodate program (#304)
• Fix shell autocomplete command path (#678)
• Add geocal program (#679)

I'm particularly happy about adding scrollback buffer support, allowing me to scroll up in the console and no longer be limited to what was last printed on the screen. Adding a search mode to the editor and some ed-like commands will also make me more productive inside the OS.

A number of PRs are related to process memory, and I made some progress in running more complex programs. Notably, my lunisolar calendar geodate does a lot of astronomical computations that tested the alloc and free syscalls. I had to introduce some workarounds to get everything running, and the result is not bug-free. I'll have to do it the right way later.

Finally I added a basic package manager called pkg to download files that are not bundled with the kernel image.

Tags: news, cloudcheck.cc, moros