World’s Smallest Operating System [BareMetal]

A typical full-fledged OS could ranges from 1-20GB before/after installation. But How small can it really get? Few Megabytes? Kilobytes, perhaps.

BareMetal is an open source CLI-based Operating system.

The OS is written entirely in Assembly while applications can be written in Assembly or C/C++. BareMetal is not intended to be a full-featured Operating System by any means. The two main purposes of BareMetal are for educational uses in learning low-level OS programming in 64-bit Assembly and to be used as a base for a high-speed data processing node.

BareMetal boots from a hard drive with the ability to load programs/data from a hard drive.

The OS is whooping-small sizing less than 16Kb. Yes, that’s true it’s approximately  equivalent to a thumbnail JPG image. Obviously, OS with such a small foorprint will be limited on features, here is the summary of what this OS can do:

• Speed: With use of pure Assembly code, speed is way above runtime speeds of higher level languages like C/C++, VB, and Java.
• Over 60 integrated functions to deal with input, screen output, strings, math, etc.
• Multi-Processor support for taking advantage of multiple CPUs and CPU cores in data processing applications. Scalable up to 128 x64/64-bit processors. (Now that’s huge)
• Applications in BareMetal are able to assign different program tasks to different CPU cores. If you have a Quad Core computer than you will be able to use each core. Modern Operating Systems must have full support for taking advantage of the multiple CPU/Core systems of today and in the future.

What is planned for Future:

• Future versions will call for the abilty to write data back to the hard drive, network support, and a C/C++ library.

Of course the limitation of not-able to write back to disk is notable, given that it would be done anytime soon, the project seems interesting for embedded low-footprint devices. But, most embedded devices don’t need write-back functionality anyway.

Don’t be afraid with assembly, writing apps for this OS is not at all hard, here’s a Hello world in two lines:

And Below is the Screenshot of Baremetal OS running in Windows VM:

Since the Project is fully Open source, you can get a glimpse of the repository and contribute.

Download Source Code | Download Windows VM Binary

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