daniel
7f415e724f
The display's first use of threads (docs/threading.md, docs/display.md). The
compositor stays the single owner of the framebuffer — only the main
service.run loop touches the backend and layer stack — and a dedicated
mouse-listener thread runs beside it:
- Listener: blocks on input.subscribeMouse(), accumulates relative dx/dy
into an absolute cursor position clamped to the screen, and hands it to
the compositor. It never touches the compositor, so no lock guards the
framebuffer; a parked next() lets the core halt.
- CursorChannel: a single-slot latest-value cell under a Thread.Mutex (the
renderer wants where the cursor is now, not a replay of deltas), with a
coalesced self-ipc.send poke that wakes the main loop — parked in
replyWait — as a message-notification. At most one poke is queued while
the last is undrained, so a fast mouse can't flood the endpoint.
- Render: the cursor is a top-z compositor layer; on the poke the main loop
moves it via configure + present (which damages old + new footprints).
The display binary opts into threads (addThreadedUserBinary), and
input-source gains a "mouse" mode that publishes pure motion to drive it.
Two kernel-level findings this surfaced, both fixed:
1. IPC handles do not cross threads. The handle table lives on the Task, so
the listener can't reuse the main loop's endpoint handle — it
ipc.lookup(.display)s its own handle to the same endpoint to poke through.
2. Concurrent IPC from two threads raced unlocked kernel state. The display
is the first process issuing IPC syscalls from two threads at once, which
exposed a data race (flaky #GP in installEntry): create_ipc_endpoint /
ipc_register / ipc_lookup allocate from the kernel heap and mutate the
global registry, endpoint refcounts, and handle tables without the big
kernel lock. They were safe only while a process couldn't race itself.
They now sync.enter() like call/reply_wait/send already did (the kernel
heap has no lock of its own yet — heap.zig: "a lock comes with
threads/SMP" — so the big lock keeps its callers serialized).
Test: -Dtest-case=display-cursor (smp:4) spawns the input service, the
threaded display, and input-source in mouse mode; asserts the display's
"cursor tracking mouse ok" marker once the cursor has tracked a run of motion
end to end. Verified green 6/6 under stress (the race hit ~1-in-4 before the
lock fix) and in the full 29-case QEMU guardrail suite; zig build test clean.
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/, 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.