nortti
/
sortix-mirror
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Updated the README.

This commit is contained in:
Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen 2012-03-14 15:14:21 +01:00
parent e0eabd0e5f
commit a353706011
1 changed files with 20 additions and 14 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

34
README
View File

@ -12,7 +12,9 @@ The system aims to be an Unix-clone and is heavily based on POSIX. However, I've
drawn much inspiration from systems such as Plan 9, GNU/Hurd and MINIX. Indeed,
I plan to construct a micro-kernel with user-space filesystems, per-process
namespaces, replacing many system calls with filesystem nodes, and other
exciting features.
exciting features. This design will make it safe to let normal users perform
operations such as mounting and create their own "sub-operating-system"
environment where they are the root.
System Requirements
-------------------
@ -20,7 +22,7 @@ Sortix has very low system requirements. It also works well under virtual
machines such as VirtualBox and Qemu.
* A 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64 CPU.
* A dozen megabyte RAM.
* A dozen megabytes of RAM.
* A harddisk or cdrom drive or support for booting from USB.
* A multiboot compliant bootloader if booting from harddisk.
* A Parallel ATA harddisk, if you wish to access it from Sortix. SATA is not
@ -39,8 +41,8 @@ A number of standard utilities are present such as cat, head, tail, clear, cp,
column, kill, ls, rm, pwd, uname, echo, and uptime. There is even a number of
non-standard utilities such as calc, help, init, kernelinfo, memstat, and pager.
This collection of utilities will continue to grow as it matures and third party
software is ported. I've currently had some luck porting gzip and parts of
binutils.
software is ported. I've currently had some luck partially porting binutils,
ocaml, and gzip, but the system isn't fully ready for such software yet.
A number of small games is present and uses the VGA textmode to render ASCII
graphics. Notably you can play two-player Pong, or single-player Snake, or the
@ -49,20 +51,19 @@ attraction of the system for non-technical people.
The Sortix kernel has very basic filesystem support. The root filesystem / is
simply a single-directory RAM filesystem. The init ramdisk is mounted read-only
on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. A lot of
work is currently going into implementing a fully-working kernel virtual file
system able to outsource filesystem requests to user-space servers. Once this is
completed we will be able to shape Sortix into a real microkernel based system.
on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. Work is
underway to create an ext2 filesystem server, but it won't be of much use until
the kernel virtual filesystem is completed in the 0.7dev development cycle.
Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above).
There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user
exists). I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is
in place. Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is
a multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no
framework in place for sharing it.
There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user exists
I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is in place.
Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is a
multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no framework
in place for sharing it.
Technical details
----------------
@ -77,7 +78,7 @@ Building
To build the Sortix source code you need to install a few dependencies. First of
all you need the GNU Compiler Collection (C and C++), GNU Make, and GNU
Binutils. You then need to build and install the included macro preprocessor
mxmpp somewhere in your PATH such as /usr/bin. If you wish to build the 32-bit
(mxmpp) somewhere in your PATH such as /usr/bin. If you wish to build the 32-bit
version of Sortix, you need the Netwide Assembler (nasm) as parts of it hasn't
been ported to the GNU assembler yet. You need a GNU/Linux build system to build
Sortix, although, it wouldn't be difficult to port the build system to other
@ -116,6 +117,11 @@ License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
The libmaxsi standard library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
Any experimental repositories and branches on Gitorious related to Sortix but
which contains no copyright statements are also released under the GNU General
Public License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version. These
things are so experimental that I didn't add copyright statements yet.
Sortix is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the gpl.html and lgpl.html files for more information.