Daniel Samson
81dd1e9318
pci-bus joins usb-xhci-bus in receiving its device from the manager rather
than claiming the id it found in argv[1]. Its hello moves ahead of the ECAM
mapping, since that is where the bridge now arrives, and its hello was
already mandatory so nothing about its failure behaviour changes.
isDelegated compared whole strings, which silently missed this driver: the
manager records the boot-snapshot match as the bare "pci-bus" and a
devices.csv match as the full "/system/drivers/pci-bus". pci-bus was then
neither claiming nor delegated and died on "ECAM mmio_map failed". It now
matches on the last path component. Reintroducing the whole-string compare
breaks usb-xhci-bus instead of pci-bus — the two spellings swap which driver
loses — so usb-hid is the case that catches it, not pci-scan.
pci-scan asserts the delegation on the initial bring-up AND after the
restart drill, with the device id backreferenced so both must name the same
device. That is what proves the manager re-takes a device when its driver
dies and hands it to the replacement, which is the property the whole
supervision design rests on.
The remaining three claimants are NOT converted, and the plan records why
rather than working around it. ps2-bus and the acpi service never hello at
all, which device-manager.md states deliberately ("legacy drivers ... not
yet required to hello"), so delegating to them means either promoting them
out of legacy or giving the grant a delivery point that is not hello.
virtio-gpu hellos best-effort by design — "standalone bring-up has no
manager" — and delegation would make it mandatory. Both are decisions, not
mechanical steps.
Consequence: D6 is blocked, because device_claim cannot be closed off while
three claimants still depend on it. D7-D9 are unaffected — they concern what
the kernel stores and how its table is sized.
Suite 118/118.
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.