ozkl / soso, Hacker News

Soso is a simple unix-like operating system written in Nasm assembly and mostly in C. It supports multiboot, so it is started by Grub. It can be built using Nasm and Clang. You can use GCC instead of Clang, if you want. Tested build environments are Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 10 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Soso is a 32 – bit x 86 operating system and its features are

Multitasking with processes and threads

Memory Paging with 4MB pages

Kernelspace (runs in ring0) and userspace (runs in ring3) are separated

Virtual File System

FAT 32 filesystem using FatFs
System calls
Libc (Newlib is ported with only basic calls like open, read, ..)

Userspace programs as ELF files

mmap support

Framebuffer graphics (userspace can access with mmap)

Shared memory

Paging is written for 4MB page support, since it is easier to implement. Downside of this is, each process has to use at least 4MB memory.

Soso has Libc, so existing applications depending only on a small part of Libc can easly be ported to Soso. I have managed to build and run Lua and Doom on Soso!

You can download afrom releases and try in a virtualization software like VirtualBox or in a PC emulator like QEMU. When it is started, you can run: “doom”, “ls”, “lua”. Executables are in /initrd.

To try Soso in QEMU, just run:

qemu-system-i 386 -cdrom soso.iso

Lua

Doom

To demonstrate multitasking, two doom processes running at the same time:

To build kernel just run:

make

this will build only kernel (kernel.bin).

To build userspace binaries (while in userspace directory):

make

this will build userspace binaries in userspace / bin directory.

Now an initrd (initial ramdisk) image is needed to put userspace binaries. To create it, run as root (linux specific):

./ create-initrd.sh

This will create initrd.fat file. This is a mountable FAT 32 initrd image. Once kernel initialization is complete, initrd contents are copied into / dev / ramdisk1 and it is mounted to / initrd. After that kernel runs the / initrd / shell ELF file.