Ghost Kernel | Hacker News Reader

Ghost Kernel

ghostkernel.org

>"Ghost is a hobby operating system for the Intel x86 platform. The project is licensed as GPLv3. It was started as a research project to learn more about low-level software programming and computer internals. The sources are available on GitHub (https://github.com/maxdev1/ghost).

Features

The kernel and the userspace applications are written from scratch in C++ and Assembly (and some C). It is not based on any existing kernel.

There is a POSIX.1 compatibility layer to simplify porting some software to the system.

o Micro-kernel

o Symmetric multi-processing

o Patched GCC (OS specific toolchain)

o IPC (pipes, signals, messages, shared memory)

o ELF executable & shared library support

o libc, self-made

o libghostapi, kernel API library

o libghostuser, simplified file I/O, creating UIs etc.

o libstdc++ port

o VESA video driver

o Window server (GUI with homemade toolkit)

o PS/2 keyboard & mouse driver

o Userspace filesystem driver support

o Serial COM1 debug interface

o Virtual 8086 for BIOS calls

o Copy-on-write implementation, fork()"

This site commits the error that thousands of open source projects in the SourceForge era made: messing up the navigation defaults by making the first thing a visitor to the main site sees is no explanation of what the thing actually is and instead a bunch of zero-context news items significant to the maintainer and pretty much nobody else. (Possibly relevant to a handful of people, if the project has fans, but even then, likely not; those fans are not going to be stumbling upon random links to the homepage in the wild, since there are better mechanisms available to anyone who is actually keeping up with a project.) The vast majority of visitors to the main site are better served by a proper landing page, i.e., what you get when you visit /about on this site.

Very cool! I love these hobby OS projects. Reminds me of Andreas Kling's SerenityOS http://serenityos.org/

Part of me gets a little jealous as I would love to do this. The closest I ever got was a minimal kernel and shell with tcp/ip and an irc client that would boot on a Pentium 4 many years ago and get me connected to efnet. I was very proud at the time :)

Finding the time needed to get to the level of this project is more than I have available sadly.

If you like this, check out https://wiki.osdev.org. Tons of OS projects on there, some are very impressive.

Amazing amount of work from one person. I admire the dedication and effort.

I was unable to find some basic information such us: What are minimum requirements? 386SX, 486? Pentium, Pentium with PAE/SSE2?

It seems that this is one of those projects developed and "tested" only inside virtual machine. Quite similar to recent port of 16-bit Unix to x86, which I was unable to boot on real 32-bit 386 CPU despite the claims.

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