I’ve received a request to release the source for Kinetic, a project I worked on in Haskell around the winter of 2006 (iirc). There are two reasons why I’ve put this off:

This was one of the first projects I worked on in Haskell, and the source shows that. My experience has been Haskell is often criticized based on the quality of code produced by its n00bs. This is an unreasonable thing to do (imagine judging a unicycle based on how well someone can ride it on their first go!) but I see it often none the less. I hope that this release does not lead to more of this nonsense. The project had ambitious goals that I never had the time to pursue (I’m sure many hackers know that feeling…) I’m really not interested in hearing about how I didn’t deliver on that. It’s just something I was working on when I was in college, you dig?

I’ve uploaded a snapshot of my development directory here. The build process attempts to download the source to ghc-6.6 and build it locally for use in the construction of the kernel. It will also try to find (using very basic means) the object files for many non-system C routines used to support the GHC runtime.

The Makefile should be able to produce a bootable CD ISO that can be used with VMWare. The operating system includes a driver for the VMWare graphics adapter, which it will assume is what the host system provides (so it probably won’t get very far in Bochs or qemu).

Of course, when I tried building it on my current machine, the build failed in ghc-6.6. I know that I was working on replacing the GUI with a console-based shell at some point; it’s possible that the source I posted is somewhere in the middle of that, and won’t build as a result. I’ll investigate this more when I get a chance.

I’d be happy to answer any questions about the system as best as I can. Happy hacking!