2719b93530
These were the awkward ones. Each began with an operation packed into a single byte — two of them with a version wedged in beside it — so there was no wrapping them: the layouts had to be rebuilt. The device manager's own enumerate and subscribe become the reserved verbs that mean the same thing everywhere, its replies lose three status structs the envelope already carries, and a device id becomes the packet's target. Power drops the version it repeated on every request, because describe is the handshake, and stops claiming a 64-byte ceiling it never needed for calls. USB moves a control transfer's data to the packet tail in both directions, which makes the status length the transferred length and retires a field that had been saying the same thing twice. The danger in this one was not the protocols but their readers. Init recognised a power button by two bytes at the head of a message, the ACPI service dispatched on the first byte, the xHCI driver read its operation with a raw integer load, and the HID drivers reinterpreted a report wholesale — none of which would have failed to compile once the layouts moved. They would simply have stopped: no shutdown on the power button, no reports from the keyboard. Every one of them now reads through the generated types, and the shutdown gate that answers only a subscriber is the same code it was. Two sizes were decided by measuring rather than assuming. The child-added message is both a request and the event broadcast to subscribers, and alignment rounds it to 48 bytes, which puts its packet exactly on the 64-byte push floor — a test pins that, because a field added carelessly would now overflow it. The interrupt report gives up eight bytes of inline room to make space for the header; the two drivers that produce reports send eight and four. Suite 110/110. |
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| boot | ||
| build | ||
| build-support | ||
| docs | ||
| library | ||
| system | ||
| test | ||
| tools | ||
| usr/share/fonts | ||
| .editorconfig | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| README.md | ||
| build.zig | ||
| build.zig.zon | ||
README.md
DanOS
Codename: Shodan
A very small resilient operating system.
Zen of DanOS:
- Resilient Micro-Kernel Architecture.
- Every process run in an isolated user space not kernel space.
- Processes cannot take down the entire OS with it when they die or is killed
- Stable public runtime library, private OS ABI.
- Keeps a stable runtime for user space processes between OS versions (great for backwards compatibility)
- Allows the underlying OS to be changed without effecting applications
- Provides a boundary to enable compatibility between OS's e.g. POSIX, MUSL etc
- Drivers are just isolated processes in user space.
- Thin binaries that can be restarted like applications.
- Useful during driver development.
- Drivers can claim MMIO / ports
- Driver resources (e.g. IRQ/Port/MMIO) claims are automatically cleaned up if the driver dies or is killed
- Drivers can also hook into the process lifecycle to clean up or reset hardware
- No legacy to deal with
- Zig code uses a clean coding style (Zen of Zig)
- Favor reading code over writing code.
- No magic numbers.
- No shortened names unless its for ABI compatibility or acronyms
- Inter-Process Communication (IPC)
- Publish and subscribe to Asynchronous Messages
- Talk to services and processes synchronously
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 a FHS-shaped zig-out/ that is the danos filesystem and the boot volume:
the UEFI bootloader at zig-out/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi, the kernel at
zig-out/system/kernel, init at zig-out/system/services/init, drivers under
zig-out/system/drivers/, the test fixtures under zig-out/test/system/services/,
and the initial-ramdisk at zig-out/boot/.
Release media
zig build release-x86-64
Produces zig-out/danos-x86-64.iso, a hybrid ISO that boots flashed raw to a
USB stick (balenaEtcher, dd) or burned to optical media — see
docs/release-iso.md. zig build check-iso-image
validates it without booting.
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 why behind the code live in
docs/ — start with docs/README.md.
For the hardware needed to run DanOS — minimum specs plus a plain-language guide
matching Intel/AMD CPU generations by name — see
docs/system-requirements.md.
Logo
San Serif Text "Dan OS" with a black karate belt around it.