README

About
=====

Opsys is a hobbyist operating system, intended for experimentation and
tinkering. It features a microkernel-based design with similarities to L4.

The project's home is http://github.com/tdz/opsys.


Features
========

* booting (yeah!)
* support for 32-bit protected mode
* simple IPC primitives

badly needed:

* more testing for locking; might have lurking deadlocks and races
* syscalls for receiving IPC messages, however the basic infrastructure is
  there; locking primitives are needed to fully implement IPC
* userland servers; the kernel needs to work first


Usage
=====

This might work:

* install a recent Linux system with gcc, binutils, etc
* make sure you have sudo permissions
* checkout and build the git tree via

        git clone git://github.com/tdz/opsys.git opsys
        cd opsys
        make image

* if everything goes well the resulting file 'opsyshdd.img' can be used
  from within QEMU, or copied to a disk via dd; opsys is installed in and
  bootable from the disk image's first partition.


Legal info
==========

Opsys is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License,
version 3 or later. A copy of the license can be found in the file COPYING,
or at 'http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html'.

The file `res/genimage/opsyshdd.img.base' contains binary code of the GNU
GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB). GRUB is free software under the terms of
the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. For more information
about GRUB, have a look at 'http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/'.