122 lines
6.1 KiB
Plaintext
122 lines
6.1 KiB
Plaintext
The Sortix Operating System
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===========================
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Sortix is a hobby operating system. It was originally created as a tool to learn
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more about kernel and operating system design and implementation. Today is
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transforming into a real operating system. The standard library and kernel is
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rich enough that some third party software can and has been ported to Sortix.
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However, the system remains quite limited as of this writing. Many features are
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missing such as proper filesystem support, bitmap graphics, and networking.
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Proper filesystem support is currently being added.
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The system aims to be an Unix-clone and is heavily based on POSIX. However, I've
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drawn much inspiration from systems such as Plan 9, GNU/Hurd and MINIX. Indeed,
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I plan to construct a micro-kernel with user-space filesystems, per-process
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namespaces, replacing many system calls with filesystem nodes, and other
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exciting features.
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System Requirements
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-------------------
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Sortix has very low system requirements. It also works well under virtual
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machines such as VirtualBox and Qemu.
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* A 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64 CPU.
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* A dozen megabyte RAM.
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* A harddisk or cdrom drive or support for booting from USB.
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* A multiboot compliant bootloader if booting from harddisk.
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* A Parallel ATA harddisk, if you wish to access it from Sortix. SATA is not
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supported yet.
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Features
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--------
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The current development version of Sortix offers a traditional multi-process
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protected environment with round-robin scheduling. A quick and dirty shell is
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able to execute programs in foreground or background mode, handle IO redirection
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and piping the standard output of a process into the standard input of another.
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A real shell will be added as the system matures and I get around to finish the
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work in progress shell.
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A number of standard utilities are present such as cat, head, tail, clear, cp,
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column, kill, ls, rm, pwd, uname, echo, and uptime. There is even a number of
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non-standard utilities such as calc, help, init, kernelinfo, memstat, and pager.
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This collection of utilities will continue to grow as it matures and third party
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software is ported. I've currently had some luck porting gzip and parts of
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binutils.
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A number of small games is present and uses the VGA textmode to render ASCII
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graphics. Notably you can play two-player Pong, or single-player Snake, or the
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nice and turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main
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attraction of the system for non-technical people.
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The Sortix kernel has very basic filesystem support. The root filesystem / is
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simply a single-directory RAM filesystem. The init ramdisk is mounted read-only
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on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. A lot of
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work is currently going into implementing a fully-working kernel virtual file
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system able to outsource filesystem requests to user-space servers. Once this is
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completed we will be able to shape Sortix into a real microkernel based system.
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Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
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that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
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be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above).
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There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user
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exists). I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is
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in place. Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is
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a multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no
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framework in place for sharing it.
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Technical details
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----------------
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The system is mostly coded in C++, but also contains a few files in C. However,
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the user-land experiences a normal C programming interface as per POSIX.
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Executable files natively uses the ELF format used on GNU/Linux and other
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systems. There is no shared library support yet, but it'll be possible when I
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get around to implement copy-on-write memory, mmap(2) and swapping to disk.
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Building
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--------
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To build the Sortix source code you need to install a few dependencies. First of
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all you need the GNU Compiler Collection (C and C++), GNU Make, and GNU
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Binutils. You then need to build and install the included macro preprocessor
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mxmpp somewhere in your PATH such as /usr/bin. If you wish to build the 32-bit
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version of Sortix, you need the Netwide Assembler (nasm) as parts of it hasn't
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been ported to the GNU assembler yet. You need a GNU/Linux build system to build
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Sortix, although, it wouldn't be difficult to port the build system to other
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platforms. You can then build the Sortix kernel and user-space utilities by
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running make in the Sortix root source directory. By default it will build to
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your CPU architecture (64-bit on 64-bit systems, 32-bit otherwise). Use
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CPU=x86 or CPU=x64 as arguments to make to control which target is built.
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To build a bootable ISO you need GNU GRUB 2, as that is used by "make iso" to
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generate the iso. In turn, GNU GRUB relies on xorriso to create the iso file.
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You can burn the ISO to a cdrom or dvd, or even dd(1) it onto a USB memory stick
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and boot from if it your BIOS supports it. You can also provide it to a virtual
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machine. Alternatively you can install the kernel binary and initrd in your
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/boot directory and configure GRUB to boot Sortix.
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Links
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-----
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You can visit the official website at http://www.maxsi.org/software/sortix/ for
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more information and news. You can also download the newest release and cutting
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edge nightly builds.
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You can retrieve the current git master from our gitorious project page from
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https://gitorious.org/sortix/.
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License
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-------
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Copyright(C) Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen <sortie@maxsi.org> and contributors 2011,
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2012.
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The Sortix kernel, the filesystem servers, the initrd tools, the utilities, the
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games, and the benchmark programs are licensed under the GNU General Public
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License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
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The libmaxsi standard library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
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License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
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Sortix is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
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WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
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PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the gpl.html and lgpl.html files for more information.
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