五OS Pre-alpha1

[MagicalTux]

五OS is a new 32bits (aiming at 64bits) Operating System project focusing on boot speed and ease of use (ease of use will come later, boot speed too, for now we're working on core and drivers).

We have a compiled version for everyone's eyes, with a hard disk image available for download.

The hard disk image includes a lot of modules, and a kernel which has the following modules linked in:

Code: Select all

0: kernel (Go-OS Kernel) v0.1.535
1: input/ps2kbd (PS/2 keyboard driver for x86) v0.1.0
2: core/pci (Core PCI driver) v0.1.0
3: core/x86emu (x86emu) v0.1.0
4: blkdev/ata_generic (Generic ATA disk support) v0.1.0
5: blkdev/ide (IDE controller) v0.1.0
6: blkdev/bios (BIOS (16bits legacy mode) disk driver) v0.1.0
7: fs/ext2 (EXT2 filesystem support) v0.1.0
8: core/module_helper (Module Helper subsystem) v0.1.0

The image will initialize all these modules, then will run a "coldplug" process to detect (PCI) hardware and load other modules. QEmu's "std-vga" adapter, VMWare and VirtualBox graphical adapaters are recognized, however VirtualBox won't work as they say SYSENTER/SYSEXIT doesn't work in cpuid (those are required as all syscalls only work with SYSENTER for now).

In case no harddisk is found, the system will fallback to blkdev/bios driver (uses x86emu 16bits emulation to access disk). It seems to work well on qemu and most hardware systems (not all, we still have some troubles with some bioses).

Once the system has detected a hard disk and loaded modules for the known hardware, it will try to switch to 800x600x24bits. If no card was found, the display/vesa_legacy driver will be loaded, and will initialize a standard VESA mode using 16bits emulation.

After boot, if a network adapter was found (only RTL-8139 works for now), DHCP packet will be sent. All log packets are also sent on the network, allowing to do some remote log viewing (including files/line numbers) with a nice tool (that will soon be added to the sdk).

I'm not really looking for people to test on VMWare/VirtualBox/QEmu/Bochs, but more for people to test on real hardware. I'm not 100% sure but I guess it won't work with most usb keys, but you can still transfer the image to some ide disk and try to boot from that. It may work (we have a AHCI driver in progress, but it's still far from being complete).

We will focus on fixing bugs for a while, then we'll resume development of new features. We plan on releasing alpha1 on september 2008. It will include new drivers (usb, ahci, intel display adapters, cirrus display adapter, maybe some ati display adapters too, etc) and kernel fixes (multi process, etc). If we are lucky, we'll even have newlib ported and syscalls working, and some gnu tools working (bash, etc).

NB: The next step for alpha2 will be to drop the boot shell, and boot directly to gfx mode, as fast as possible.

URLs :
Website/Wiki : http://5os.net/
Bugtrack : http://bugtrack.5os.net/
Distribution (files) : http://dist.5os.net/
Hard disk image to download and run : http://dist.5os.net/dev/alpha1/goos-mini-latest.zip

If you don't want to register to post bugs on our bugtrack, you can also post replies here.

[inflater]

Hi,
I can test your OS on a real HW, but I would like a pre-compiled floppy image instead of a HDD image... can that be done?

Anyways, looks nice at the specs.
But I'm unsure of the name.... is it "5OS" or "Fi Underlined OS" ?

[iammisc]

@inflater: The character he used seems to be in some asian writing system(chinese, perhaps?)

[MagicalTux]

The character 五 is Japanese, and means five, however it's pronounced "Go". Basically, the OS name is pronounced "Go-O.S.", and written 5os. It may look like half-leet-speak for "sos", but it's not.

As for the floppy image, it *was* planned, and should be still possible as the total code image is around 720kB. I'll work on this.

[inflater]

@inflater: The character he used seems to be in some asian writing system(chinese, perhaps?)

Yeah I know, I was only joking Anyways looking forward to testing (266 Mhz PII, 98 MB RAM).
my 1000th post

[MagicalTux]

Hi,

I got the USB bug fixed (now able to boot from USB key), however since we use SYSENTER/SYSEXIT and some other advanced features, I'm not 100% it will work on a Pentium II.

I also have a problem loading the shell ELF file, the system seems to triple fault in this case. I'll try a little hack to see if I can get some debug output for this.