October 6, 2016

The Kyu real-time operating system - Kyu on the x86

Kyu was originally developed (back in 2005 or so) on the x86. This was in the day when desktop PC's had an ISA bus and perhaps even a legacy parallel port. Those things were passing from the scene even then, and now are entirely gone. Back in that era, Kyu was called "skidoo", and you may find relics of this name in the source files here and there.

Current desktop PC's are now an unattractive target for something like Kyu. The people building things that want to control hardware have almost entirely moved to the ARM platform, as has Kyu, and most likely so should you if you are reading this.

Intel has made a feeble and ill thought out attempt to join the maker movement with boards like the Edison and Galileo. These efforts are doomed due to the lack of quality documentation and high prices. The one thing they did get right was the names of the projects (Edison beats "Beaglebone" any day), but it is all downhill from there.

Someday though, just for old times sake, it would be good to get Kyu running on the X86 once again. It is not clear to me if Kyu will even run without major changes on the current crop of x86 based desktop PC's.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Kyu / tom@mmto.org