OP here. Sciter looks cool, nice site too. Currently Minoca has support for a basic framebuffer, which we use to display our green terminal. Our biggest obstacle to having a GUI now is the lack of accelerated graphics drivers. We'd like to add them, but it will be a very large undertaking and probably require cooperation from one of the major graphics vendors.
We currently run on x86 PCs and a number of ARM SoCs (the linked page should give you an idea of which ones). Adding support for new SoCs and boards is pretty straighforward. Feel free to reach out to me directly with what you have in mind: evan AT minocacorp.
Thanks for the feedback. We're optimistic about the idea of focusing on what can be gained by starting from scratch. Specifically by creating a modern API between the core kernel and device drivers, we think we can make interesting advances in areas like system-wide power management, component level servicing/updates, and overall "debuggability". We believe these areas will become even more important as general purpose operating systems are integrated into more embedded devices.
Not at the moment, but our interrupt overhead and number of background tasks is so low it's something we're thinking about. Is there a specific scenario you're trying to enable?
Yes, you could use Minoca to manage GPIO and other low level hardware. One area where we're working to excel is power management. There's so little in the OS that we're able to go very idle, and stay there for long periods. Another area we're focused on is component level servicing: being able to update components within the kernel while maintaining a high degree of stability.
To user mode we'd like to present a largely compatible interface, while in the kernel we want to innovate using new designs and a clean slate.
We're systems people, so we can help folks building new hardware devices with tasks like bring-up and sustained support. There's a stable kernel API, which makes component level updates within the kernel possible.
It boots to a shell in about 5MB of RAM, with networking and USB. Both Linux and Minoca can get smaller than that depending on how much you're willing to strip. The goal was to start lean and clean and then go up or down depending on specific needs. (Disclaimer: I work on Minoca OS).