Virtix - Design is Law

Virtix is an operating system with one goal in mind: simplicity. There are plenty of sacrifices, but ultimately, I think that a tiny kernel is incredibly beneficial to the programmer. With something like Linux, I don't even think Torvalds is able to fully comprehend the codebase anymore. Virtix should be able to fit within a programmers mind completely. (I don't want to bash Linux)

Design

• Virtix is a monolithic kernel
• The scheduler is a simple cooperative multitasker
• The main file system is a special metafs on top of FAT16, for cross-platform compatibility
• Multiboot compliant

Layout

• Kernel code is in virtix/src/
• Libc code is in virtix/libc/
• Userland files are in virtix/userland
• Userland binary sources are in virtix/userland/src
• Documentation will eventually be in virtix/doc

Progress

• Paging
• Multitasking
• A very simple ELF parser
• File streams
• ATA support
• A small libc
• devfs

TODO

• Heap implementation needs a lot of work
• ELF loader could definitely be improved

Building Requirements

• nasm
• GNU coreutils
• i686-elf-gcc
• GNU make
• bash or zsh
• grub2 if you want to make bootable ISO images
• Optionally, qemu or bochs for testing

To build simply navigate to virtix/ and type make. If you have qemu, and you want to test, type make run to build and load into the VM.

Special Thanks To

• James Molloy - His guide set up the basis of this kernel
• Github User Levex - His osdev repo had a lot of great examples inside
• Brokenthorn OS development series - Taught me OS dev basics/advanced x86 assembly
• Ralph Brown - His interrupt list is indispencable
• And of course, The OSDev Wiki - This is a spectacular resource
• #osdev on Freenode is a lifesaver