Firedrake is a very simple kernel for the i486 architecture, with the sole puprose of learning more about low level and system programming. Its designed by an absolute novice to kernel hacking, so it probably includes some stupid/uncommon design decisions! Although there are no plans to make a *nix like system, some of the API follows the POSIX specification and there are plans to widen this out in the future, but a few things might retain their own API which isn't POSIX conform.
Most of the development progress is documented on my blog.
List of note-worthy features:
- Interrupt handling
- Memory management (virtual and physical, including a slab allocator for the kernel)
- Preemptive multitasking
- An in-kernel dynamic link editor for loading kernel drivers at runtime
- Support for processes and multithreading
- Support for loading and executing ELF binaries
- Support for syscalls
- Kernel wide unit tests
Development of Firedrake happens mostly in two branches: The master branch, which contains patches for the current stable release, and the unstable branch which contains the changes for the next major release. Versioninging follows the Semantic Versioning standard.
You probably have the most succes at compiling Firedrake if you are running some kind Linux flavour with the following packages installed:
- llvm (at least 3.x)
- clang (at least 3.x)
- make
If you want to create mountable ISO files, you also need the following two packages:
- grub-rescue-pc
- xorriso
You also need to mark the /boot/CreateImage.sh script as executable by running chmod +x ./boot/CreateImage.sh.
To make a complete build of Firedrake, you only need to run make, which will compile the kernel as well as all default libraries and programs. If you want to create a bootable ISO file, you need to run the make install target.
You can also run the help target which prints a list of targets that are available together with a description of what they do.
If you want to run Firedrake but don't want to reboot your PC for it, you can use an emulator. Firedrake has been tested in qemu and VMWare Fusion, but should also run in Virtual Box, Bochs and almost every other emulator which emulates a x86 CPU and a PC BIOS.
Firedrake is released under the permissive MIT license. For more informations, please read the LICENSE file.
Firedrake uses code from the FreeBSD project for 64bit software integer division. The code can be found in /sys/libc/bsd/ and is released under the BSD license. See the README inside /sys/libc/bsd for more informations.