Alux is a small Hobby Operating System. The purpose of this project is to create a lightweight microkernel on top of which you may place a language interpreter like V8 or the Dart VM.
I will attempt to do all of the following:
- Provide a minimal, lightweight kernel API for IPC, basic memory management, task scheduling and time management.
- Provide a thin layer of security specific to the CPU architecture
- Allow user-space tasks to manage the resources of other user-space tasks with almost no exceptions
As an end result, I hope to be able to create a distribution of Alux that runs the Dart VM. This distribution will ship with a set of drivers and programs written entirely in Dart. The distribution may include some sort of user-space ELF loader for native plugins.
Additionally, I plan to spin off a version of Alux that runs the V8 JavaScript engine. Ideally, if Runtime.JS ends up with a strong JavaScript API, I will implement that as part of Alux.js.
I am now in the process of making a simple "Hello world" user-space program execute:
- Change a lot of
PhysSizetosize_t - Hook up a system call handler that prints "Hello world"
- Launch a
UserTaskthat runs the system call (i.e. a test libalux app)
After all that, I will implement system calls. These system calls will provide the following facilities:
- Threading, mutexes, semaphores
- Memory management
- Launching and killing sub-tasks
- Basic I/O (e.g. keyboard driver, console)
- Assertions, exit statuses
- Static variables
- NX regions of memory
As I implement these system calls, I will create appropriate bindings for libalux.
Finally, I plan to work on an IPC mechanism. I still haven't a clue how this will work, but here's the general features it will have:
- The ability to connect to a task by specifying its PID
- A means by which to transfer information between the kernel and a driver
- A shared-memory facility for very efficient inter-process sockets
Alux is licensed under the BSD 2-clause license. See LICENSE.
Copyright (c) 2014, Alex Nichol and Alux contributors.
All rights reserved.
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