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kit

Kit really, really wants to be an operating system. Right now it's mostly just a kernel, but some really interesting things are in the works.

It currently only supports x86_64, but may be ported to other architectures in the future.

It's written in a mix of C and Rust, with ongoing efforts to remove all of the C from the kernel since Rust is a superior language. The userland will have native support libraries for both C and Rust, but currently only really supports C.

Building / Running

You'll need to have the following installed:

  • GRUB 2
  • cdrkit
  • Ruby
  • Rust nightly (1.56)
  • clang
  • QEMU

After that, just run make. If all goes well, you should be able to run make run-qemu and see Kit running.

The commands you can run are all listed in build/system/bin, and here's what they do:

  • echo: prints arguments to the screen.
  • true: exits with status 0.
  • false: exits with status 1.
  • key: tests keyboard input. Press control-D to exit.
  • poke_null: crashes the system currently, but really should only crash the process.
  • shell: what you're in right now. There's no way to get out of a shell currently.
  • yield: argument should be a number, which is a multiplier for the number of cycles to spin and do nothing between yielding to the scheduler. This was originally used to test the cooperative multitasking, but now multitasking is preemptive. Try yield 30 & key to see that you can actually still type while yield is using all of the processor time. That wasn't the case before.

What's going on?

  • Improving the C standard library coverage to be able to port Lua (branch: topic/lua)

What's planned for the future?

  • Replace bin/shell with a Lua interpreter.

  • Complete syscall overhaul, with a generic IPC interface and no C strings.

  • IPC/host model. Each process, except the root host, will have a host process defined that is expected to handle configuration at the current scope.

  • Application model, with a protocol probably resembling BSON, because I think it will be really cool.

  • No args. No pipes. No stdin/stdout. This ain't UNIX. Processes only communicate with their host, and whatever other processes their host has granted them permission to talk to.

  • Of course, C compatibility is nice, so we'll put a layer over all of this that allows C applications to function as intended.

    1> apps.editor:start() 2> apps.editor:open(recipes["ginger stir fry"])

And then you're in the editor. Sound fun? Haven't really figured out the specifics, but this is the direction I want to go in.