Oxygen is a small microkernel primarily designed to run on AMD64 compatible platforms.
Currently supported features include:
- Multiboot Compatibility: Oxygen will boot using any boot loader that conforms to the multiboot specification. Trough usage of a 32 bit loader even GRUB Legacy or any other multiboot boot loader that does not support loading of 64 bit binaries can be used for running the Oxygen platform.
- Designed for AMD64: Oxygen is designed to run on modern AMD64-compatible processors from the beginning. This comes with the possibility to address up to 256TiB of physical memory, a higher number of general-purpose registers available for free use and native support for 64 bit integer arithmetics.
- Symmetric Multiprocessing: Oxygen comes with native support for multiprocessor systems as defined in the Intel MP specifications.
- Microkernel design: Oxygen is designed to implement the model of a microkernel and the principles of JeOS (Just enough Operating System) to provide maximum stability and flexibility in configuring the system.
For a proper build Oxygen requires the following tools to be present on the build system:
- make (known to work with version 3.81)
- ld (known to work with version 2.20.51)
- gcc (known to work with version 4.4.5)
- nasm (known to work with version 2.08.01)
- mkisofs (known to work with version 1.1.10)
For emulation bochs (known to work with version 2.4.6) is recommended and should at least be configured with the following options:
$ ./configure --enable-smp --enable-cpu-level=6 --enable-acpi --enable-x86-64 --enable-cdrom