{"id":1458,"date":"2026-09-02T16:15:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T05:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/?p=1458"},"modified":"2026-09-02T16:33:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T05:33:21","slug":"whats-to-come-technical-teaser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/blog\/2026\/09\/02\/whats-to-come-technical-teaser\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s To Come: Technical Teaser"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well I won&#8217;t tell you exactly what I&#8217;m about to drop yet but I will tell you about some of the research behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was young I used to go to the garbage tip with my dad, pick up old computers very cheaply and try to get them working. I developed a great eye for spotting a good classic model but there were rarely many disks with them. It was fairly rare to get all of the good game disks with an old machine, but I often ended up with things like early business programs and on other machines just a BASIC shell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Times change but skills only really grow. While I&#8217;ve been working on a new operating kernel &amp; new accessories for new computers, I started looking over old systems again for ideas. Something about old operating systems became immediately clear, they can be divided into two categories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Fast Enough To Rebuild In 2026<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A good &#8220;usable&#8221; operating system does not actually need to support modern hardware, modern hardware is easily good enough and supporting legacy hardware emulation on top of whatever vendor-provided kernel is installed isn&#8217;t generally problematic. A reliable legacy operating system only needs to be <em>fast enough to be usable under full emulation.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aside from being fast enough, it&#8217;s also very helpful &#8211; some might say necessary &#8211; if a system is able to recompile itself (and any necessary patches) in a reasonable way. Especially if you don&#8217;t have access to the original download servers or the original hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Failing Category<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Testing legacy x86-era operating systems under emulators on non-x86 hardware with full software emulation seems to be a very easy way of separating the higher quality code from the lower quality code. Recompiling the operating system is also a great general benchmark, as an OS which is too slow at batch processing will immediately grind to a halt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Having used almost exclusively RISC processors for the past couple of years has been a blessing in disguise for developing legacy x86 solutions as I can tell you straight away what <em>won&#8217;t <\/em> work in a solid legacy enterprise OS:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Dynamic linking everywhere<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Relying on overly-specific hardware features<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Everything is downloaded from git<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Everything is downloaded from unstable package mirrors<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;We no longer publish physical media&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Thoughtlessly advanced filesystems or VFS layers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes these things can be disabled or avoided by customising the OS, but in other cases they become a bit all-consuming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">That Leaves A Few Real Options<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The &#8220;good&#8221; legacy operating systems can further be divided into two groups:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Systems which still mostly work in their original forms but as more-finished and still-maintained systems<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Systems which were either abandoned or are still maintained but no longer support the original hardware or installation flavours<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second category has some fairly interesting options, there are a few in particular I&#8217;ve been looking into making modernised respins of to support outdated hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These can be narrowed down further by considering potential migration paths, the end result being that I should be able to deliver one or more 2026-buildable software solutions for very outdated hardware but I&#8217;m still analysing the tradeoffs. The new brand will be focused on &#8220;generic&#8221; open-source solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well I won&#8217;t tell you exactly what I&#8217;m about to drop yet but I will tell you about some of the research behind it. When I was young I used to go to the garbage tip with my dad, pick up old computers very cheaply and try to get them working. I developed a great [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}