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 PhysSize to size_t
• Hook up a system call handler that prints "Hello world"
• Launch a UserTask that 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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