Daniel Samson
f4eb88e7d2
The convention that tunables live in system/parameters.zig with their reasoning attached predates this and got 2% compliance — 5 of 235. A convention with no teeth is how a bare `const maximum_devices = 64` reached an AMD desktop and cost it USB and storage. This is the same rule with a gate behind it. tools/check-bounds.py finds every bound-shaped declaration — a `maximum_*` const with a literal value, or a type with a literal array length — and requires the five-field block above it: what it counts, who decides its size, what it protects, what happens at the limit, and how anyone finds out. The at-limit vocabulary is closed: refuse, degrade, truncate, grow. There is deliberately no way to spell "silent", no way to spell "drop", and nothing meaning "allow", so the behaviours that did the damage cannot be written down. Truncation is legal only carrying a marker the reader can see, which is why klog_maximum_message qualifies and a USB descriptor cut at 512 bytes does not. An array length that names a declared bound is not itself a bound; only literal lengths are flagged, which pushes ceilings toward having names. The 273 that predate the rule are allowlisted so this lands without a tree-wide sweep in front of it, and that list may only shrink: declaring a bound means deleting its line, and the check fails on a stale entry too. Nothing may be added. Wired into `zig build test` and available alone as `zig build bounds`. Not in the default build — it reads the whole tree, and a red bounds check should not stop you booting a kernel. Five are now declared rather than allowlisted. Writing them out is its own argument: maximum_devices reads "protects: nothing — this is a sizing guess about someone else's computer", and maximum_tasks now carries the fact that it has been raised twice, each time by something that outgrew it. Verified the gate refuses an undeclared bound, a declared one using forbidden vocabulary, and an allowlist entry that has since been declared. Suite 115/115.
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.