Daniel Samson
15b70856c9
Two driver-model milestones plus a tree-wide naming pass. Suite 35/35 (QEMU) + host tests green. M11 — IRQ-as-IPC. A ring-3 driver now sleeps until its device interrupts it. New src/kernel/irq.zig: per-GSI endpoint bindings, comptime per-vector trampolines, dispatch = mask GSI -> LAPIC EOI -> notifyLocked, all under one lock region. irq_bind/irq_ack syscalls, gated by the device claim like mmio_map. interruptDispatch no longer EOIs — each handler owns its EOI, because a level line must be masked before it is acknowledged (irq_ack is the unmask). Bindings are keyed on the owning task and released on exit (a shared endpoint's siblings survive). hpetd rewritten interrupt-driven. Tests: hpet (rewritten, reads back the I/O APIC routing) and irqfree. M12 — bus drivers. DeviceDesc gains a parent, making the device table a tree. dev_register (device_register) lets a process publish children below a device it claimed; the kernel enforces resource containment (a child's resources must nest in its parent's), so a descriptor can't fabricate a window over kernel RAM. Descriptor copied in via copyFromUser (physmap walk — an unmapped user pointer fails the call instead of faulting the kernel). Per-parent child cap bounds table exhaustion. sbin/busd.zig is a worked bus driver. Test: bus. Naming — per docs/coding-standards.md: non-acronym abbreviations spelled out (message, descriptor, device_service, scheduler, runtime, physical, interpreter, ...); acronyms kept (IPC, MMIO, DMA, HCD, ...); files are kebab-case (ipc-synchronous.zig, device-service.zig, vfs-protocol.zig, ...). Exceptions: POSIX/C ABI names and Zig idioms (init/len/ptr) kept. Module collisions resolved by specific naming (config -> parameters, device.zig alias -> device_model). AML op/Op disambiguated: op = opcode, Op = operation; per-opcode parse handlers renamed opX -> parseX. New driver docs: drivers.md, driver-model.md (bus/class/HCD shapes + the proposed M13–M16 ABI), coding-standards.md.
DanOS
Codename: Shodan Version: 1
A small operating system, written from scratch in Zig — a bootloader (src/boot/)
and a microkernel (src/kernel/), sharing a neutral handoff contract (src/root.zig).
It boots x86-64 via UEFI, and so far has a framebuffer console, a physical frame
allocator, its own paging with W^X permissions, interrupt/exception handling, a
LAPIC timer, a kernel heap, a fixed-priority preemptive scheduler, and in-kernel IPC
channels. See docs/ for how each piece works.
Prerequisites
- Zig 0.16.x — the build is pinned to this line (
.zig-version); other minor versions are rejected, because Zig makes breaking changes between releases pre-1.0. A toolchain manager such as zvm orzigupwill pick up.zig-versionautomatically. - QEMU (
qemu-system-x86_64) — to run and test the kernel. On macOS,brew install qemualso bundles the OVMF firmware below. - OVMF UEFI firmware — the
edk2-ovmfpackage (Arch),ovmf(Debian/Ubuntu), oredk2-ovmf(Fedora); on macOS it ships inside the Homebrewqemuformula. Both the build and the test harness probe the known Arch/Debian/Fedora/macOS layouts and use the first that exists, so no configuration is normally needed. Override with-Dovmf-code=/-Dovmf-vars=(build) if yours lives elsewhere. - Python 3 — for the QEMU integration test harness.
Build
zig build
Produces the UEFI bootloader (zig-out/bin/BOOTX64.efi) and the kernel ELF
(zig-out/bin/kernel).
Run
Boot it in QEMU with OVMF (opens a display window):
zig build run-x86-64
# distro with OVMF elsewhere:
zig build run-x86-64 -Dovmf-code=/path/OVMF_CODE.fd -Dovmf-vars=/path/OVMF_VARS.fd
Test
zig build test # host unit tests (the platform-independent shared code)
python3 test/qemu_test.py # QEMU integration tests: boots the kernel and asserts
# on its serial output (see docs/testing.md)
The integration harness builds and boots the kernel once per test case, checking memory, the frame allocator, paging (incl. NX and the null guard), the heap, interrupts, and exception handling. It exits non-zero on any failure, so it drops straight into CI.
Documentation
Design notes explaining the why behind the code live in
docs/ — start with docs/README.md.
Logo
San Serif Text "Dan OS" with a black karate belt around it.