Nanvix

What Is Nanvix

Nanvix is a Unix-like operating system written by Pedro H. Penna for educational purposes. It is designed to be simple and small, but also modern and fully featured.

What Hardware Is Required?

Nanvix targets 32-bit x86-based PCs and only requires a floppy or CD-ROM drive and 16 MB of RAM. You can run it either in a real PC or in a virtual machine, using a Live System's Image.

Building

Linux-like systems

In order to build Nanvix, you will need a Linux like programming environment, the x86 GCC compiler and the x86 GNU binutils.

If you are running a Debian-based Linux distribution, like Ubuntu, you can simply run the following commands at the root directory:

sudo apt-get install make
sudo bash tools/dev/setup-toolchain.sh
sudo bash tools/dev/setup-bochs.sh
sudo reboot now

When done, you can build Nanvix by typing, at the root directory:

make nanvix

Or you can build a Live System's Image by typing, at the same directory:

make image

macOS

The support of Nanvix on macOS is still experimental. It relies on the Homebrew package manager (https://brew.sh), to get the necessary UNIX-like packages to build Nanvix.

The general flow for building Nanvix on macOS from the root directory is as follows:

bash tools/dev/setup-toolchain.sh
make TARGET=i386-elf nanvix
make image

Unlike the Linux-like systems procedure, this flow does not build bochs from source. Instead, it installs the bochs package using brew. As this package does not come with gdb-stubs support, you cannot run Nanvix with --debug option (see details below).

Running

To run Nanvix, type the following command at the root directory:

bash tools/run/run.sh

The script above accepts some optional parameters to configure bochs. Please, run bash tools/run/run.sh --help for more details.

Documentation

See the documentation for an overview about the Nanvix system and detailed information.

License and Maintainers

Nanvix is a free software that is under the GPL V3 license and is maintained by Pedro H. Penna. Any questions or suggestions send him an email: [email protected]