"Tifflin" Experimental Kernel (and eventually Operating System)

This is an experiment in writing an OS Kernel in rust (http://rust-lang.org).

Mostly the architecture is being designed as I go along, but it will be written to be architecture independent (the current version is x86_64/amd64).

Testing

With the required dependencies installed, run make -C rundir ENABLE_VIDEO=1 to do a standard qemu PXE boot with display output enabled.

Design Features

• Runtime module initialisation with dependencies
• Clear user-kernel separation of duties
• Userland owns the ELF loader, kernel uses a custom format for init.
• Object-based syscall API
• Kernel-provided window manager (yes, I know old windows did this)

Progress

• Filesystems
• ISO9660
• FAT12/16/32
• Storage
• (P)ATA
• SATA (AHCI)
• ATAPI CDROM
• VirtIO Block
• Input
• PS2 Keyboard/Mouse
• Graphics
• Multiboot only
• GUI Apps
• Login (Credentials are root/password)
• "GUI Shell" (with background!)
• Text Terminal app (with basic set of commands)
• Filesystem viewer
• Architectures
• amd64 (aka x86_64) - Boots to limit of implementation
• armv7 - Loads userland then crashes

Dependencies

Build Dependencies

• nasm
• GNU Binutils (cross-compiled)
• GCC (for ACPICA)

Running

• qemu-system-amd64 (or other qemu-system-* binary)
• mtools (for making FAT volumes)
• PXE Boot: pxelinux (for doing PXE boots, the default)
• ISO Boot: grub-mkrescue (for ISO boots)
• EFI Boot: OVMF qemu firmware
• libguestfs-tools (for creating generic disk images)