LambOS is a hobby operating system with three intentions:

• Fulfill a personal long-standing goal to write an operating system.
• Gain experience in low-level software engineering and learn more about computer architecture.
• Make a codebase that is easy for OS dev beginners to read and digest in small chunks (i.e. NOT your typical terse, uncommented C code).

An allegory to the humble OS developer, naive and optimistic before hitting the confidence buzzsaw that is bare metal programming.

That, or it's a play off my old boss's NetID which had evolved into some sort of inside joke, the kind nobody outside that office could ever truly understand and only really ever serves to annoy other people. But, it worked out neatly enough for the name of an operating system.

I think I'm going to rename it after guinea pigs at some point, because you know, experimenting with OS development, being a guinea pig...

Also, have you SEEN THOSE THINGS??

In order to build LambOS, you will need a cross-compiler set up. Instructions can be found here.

The project is also configured to generate a bootable ISO. While not strictly necessary, it's useful and convenient. It is built using the grub-mkrescue utility, which requires the following:

• GRUB 2.0
• xorriso

Finally, you'll need something to run this with. Included in the project are convenience targets to boot the generated image with either Bochs or QEMU (specifically, QEMU for the i386 system target).

In order to build with CMake, you'll need to tell it where to find your cross compiler. Included in the cmake/ folder are two simple toolchain definitions for i586-elf and i686-elf. To use them, set the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE variable to the file path of the toolchain file as part of the CMake invocation.

The following targets are available:

• lambos-kernel: Builds the kernel.
• grub-bootable-iso: Builds a bootable ISO. Only available if CMake is able to locate grub-mkrescue on your machine.
• run-bochs: Configures and launches Bochs with the bootable ISO loaded. Only available if Bochs is installed (and CMake found it). By default it figures out on its own which display library to use. This and more can be configured by enabling the corresponding CMake options.
• run-qemu: Configures and launches QEMU with the bootable ISO loaded. Only available if QEMU (specifically qemu-system-i386) is installed.

The following CMake options are available for setting:

• BOCHS_USE_X: Tells bochs to use the X11 display library. (OFF)

• BOCHS_USE_SDL: Tells bochs to use the SDL display library. (OFF)

• BOCHS_USE_SDL2: Tells bochs to use the SDL2 display library. (OFF)

• BOCHS_USE_WIN32: Tells bochs to use the Win32 display library." (OFF)

• BOCHS_USE_GUI_DEBUG: Tells bochs to use the GUI debugger if able. Requires explicitly specifying a display library." (OFF)

• QEMU_USE_GDB: Tells QEMU to run with the gdbserver enabled and wait for a signal from the connection before booting. (OFF)