I've just released a release candidate for version 0.2 of my OS, Exclaim. It'd be great if people could test it on as many machines as possible so I can squish any bugs that might not have come up on the few it has been tested on.
Current features
- Preemptive (software) multitasking
- Physical and virtual (mmap-based) memory managers
- ELF kernel module and application loading
- VFS layer
- Keyboard driver (i8042)
- Some userspace apps (init, shell, ls, mkdir, mount, umount, uname, cat)
- ATA read support (via PIO, supports LBA-48 only right now)
- EXT2 read support (can mount ext2 partitions, do ls and read files off them)
- APIC timer support (used over the PIT if supported)
- V8086 mode monitor
- Simple TTY driver, supports line buffering and escape codes for colours
- Small C library, written from scratch (a lot of stuff missing right now, but there's enough for the moment)
This is a list of things that need particular testing as they have been flaky for me, or just have not received much testing
- VBE driver - doesn't seem to work on some graphics cards - compile with VBE support (or use one of the images on the download page), and run vbetest from the shell
- ATA and EXT2 drivers - try mounting ext2 partitions and reading stuff off them, there is a hard disk image provided on the download page for use with QEMU, on which /Devices/ata0d0p0 is an ext2 partition. Also, try reading from the raw devices (use cat)
And, if anyone is really, really bored, you could try writing an app and see if you can crash the kernel in any way, because I'm sure it's possible somewhere . The build system is fairly simple to add another app to, just look inside the apps directory.
Links
- Home page - http://exclaim.tuxtalk.org/
- Release page (with download) - http://exclaim.tuxtalk.org/index.php?q=releases:02rc1
- Bug tracker - https://bugs.launchpad.net/exclaim/
- Alex