NanoShell64 has been officially deprecated as of August 20th, 2023. Instead, check out its successor, The Boron Operating System

The NanoShell64 Operating System

NanoShell64 is a 64-bit operating system designed with SMP in mind.

The project is wholly licensed under the GNU General Public License V3, except the following:

• Limine Terminal: https://github.com/limine-bootloader/terminal

Be advised this is alpha-level software and you should not expect any stability from it.

NOTE: You need Limine V3.18.3, 3.0 or older doesn't work for some reason

Building

In a terminal, run the following commands:

git submodule update
make -C limine
make

(note: these are to be done on Linux or WSL1. Cygwin/MinGW32 were not tested and probably don't work.)

To run, invoke ./run-unix.sh or make run. If you are using WSL 1, you can do ./run.sh to run the built iso using your native QEMU installation on Windows.

Goals/plans

Architecture design

There's hardly a decided architecture design, as this is right now at the experimental stage. I'd like to experiment with: (currently only one thing but I may add more)

• Worker thread centered design. This can also be interpreted as a clients-server architecture.
• Each CPU has its own kernel heap. This reduces TLB shootdowns. If there's a need to transfer data between CPUs, one may use an IPI with a list of physical pages.
• Until swapping to disk is added, use a form of poor man's compression - if a page is filled to the brim with a single byte that fills unspecified criteria, it'll be "compressed" down into a single page entry.

Primordial tasks

• [x] Hello World
• [ ] SMP Bootstrap
• [ ] Inter-processor communication (through IPIs)
• [ ] Task switching and concurrency
• [ ] Physical memory manager
• [ ] Virtual memory manager
• [ ] Inter-process communication

Other features

• [ ] Init ram disk file system
• [ ] Ext2 file system support
• [ ] More... (still not decided)

Drivers

• [ ] Limine terminal
• [ ] PS/2 Keyboard
• [ ] Own terminal with framebuffer
• [ ] Serial port
• [ ] PCI
• [ ] PS/2 mouse

User

• [ ] A basic shell Still to be decided.

Far in the future

• [ ] NanoShell32 compatibility
• [ ] Networking?
• [ ] USB (could also backport to NanoShell32 itself)