Pinion - a kernel for your kernel

Pinion is a stripped-down microkernel specification that is designed to 
act as a threading and paging engine for a larger operating system. In the 
same way that a game engine provides mechanism for a video game without 
imposing specific policies, Pinion provides the common but 
difficult-to-implement components of an OS kernel without defining 
anything about how the system interacts with userspace, so that new 
systems can be developed quickly with a common stable base.

Pinion itself is only a specification for a kernel, while this project 
(pinion-x86) is a particular implementation for single-processor x86 
systems. Because the Pinion API is implementation-independent and makes 
no assumptions about things like SMP or PAE, other implementations may 
add more advanced features. The intent is for the specification to be 
comprehensive and well-defined enough for any Pinion-compliant kernel to 
be usable as a drop-in replacement for any other (for any fixed 
processor architecture, of course).

In short, if you develop an OS on top of Pinion, you will not only get 
(stable and tested!) memory management, interrupt handling, and preemptive 
multithreading for free, but also transparent upgrades. When (i.e. if)
versions of Pinion are developed for other architectures, it will also
likely be easy to port Pinion-based systems from x86 to those
architectures, because the high-level semantics will be preserved.

The name Pinion comes from the name for the outermost primary feathers 
on a bird's wing, which are critical for flight.

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Build Instructions:

Before you can build Pinion, you must install a cross compiler. This is 
completely automated. Simply type:

	make tools

Once this has completed (it may take 20-30 minutes), the Pinion kernel
and test system may be compiled and tested by typing:

	make test

(This relies on genisoimage and QEMU being installed on the host system.)

To clean up all generated files, type:

	make clean

See the Makefile for more build targets.