NyxOS boots on real hardware 🌙
NyxOS — a hobby x86-64 desktop OS written from scratch in C/asm — now boots on a physical UEFI machine, all the way to the desktop.
Verified end-to-end on an Intel Core i5-1035G7 handheld (8" UMPC): UEFI → GOP-framebuffer graphics → keyboard login → full GUI desktop (terminal, windows, taskbar, animated wallpaper), running entirely from RAM.
What it took to get here (v6.4.222 → v6.4.228)
- UEFI boot via GRUB-EFI (multiboot2), drawing into the bootloader's GOP framebuffer instead of the QEMU-only Bochs VBE.
- Fixed the first bare-metal panic — a stale multiboot-1 module parser choking on the multiboot-2 boot info — and a boot hang on an unbounded i8042 mouse-init poll.
- Display rotation (
rotate=boot option) for portrait-mounted handheld panels. - Keyboard works via i8042 legacy-USB emulation; MouseKeys drives the pointer from the keyboard (Alt+WASD to move, Alt+Space to click) when there is no mouse/touchpad.
Download & flash
NyxOS-uefi.iso— modern UEFI PCs & handhelds. Flash with Rufus in DD mode, and turn Secure Boot OFF in firmware. At the boot menu pick a rotation if your screen is portrait (handhelds: rotate 90); the default is landscape.NyxOS.iso— legacy BIOS / QEMU.
RAM-only — no disk is touched. On bare metal, networking (Wi-Fi) and the internal touchpad are not supported yet.
Try it in QEMU
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom NyxOS.iso -m 512
🌙 Nyx — goddess of the night.