Xelix kernel¶
Xelix is a hobby Unix-like kernel and operating system for x86. It has a largely GNU-based userland and can run many common Linux/BSD programs.
Features¶
- Preemptive multitasking with privilege and memory separation
- Unix process API with fork/execve/wait and signal handling
- VFS with support for dynamic mount points, poll, pipes, and in-memory file trees
- Read/write ext2 implementation, IDE and virtio-block drivers
- BSD socket API for TCP/IP support using the PicoTCP network stack
- Terminal framework with support for multiple TTYs, pseudo terminals & ECMA48 escape sequences
Current development goals¶
- Support for memory-mapping in userspace using mmap and general memory allocation overhaul
- Dynamic library loading
- Graphics compositing improvements and proper input handling for GUI tasks
- Virtual file system overhaul to cache file tree in memory and do lazy lookups only
Releases¶
Danger
Xelix is unstable pre-alpha software. Don’t use it on computers that store any data you might want to keep. Make liberal use of fsck.ext2.
| Version | Release | Download | New software |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.3.0-alpha | 2021-07-07 | QEMU qcow2 image | gfxcompd, gfxterm, libexpat, pixman, libiconv, cairo, libpng, tz, htop |
| 0.2.0 | 2020-01-26 | QEMU qcow2 image | dash, dialog, flac, gdbm, libedit, nano, openssl, tar, which, xz, bash, coreutils, freetype2, gettext, libtextstyle, mpc, pciutils, vim, binutils, darkhttpd, e2fsprogs, gmp, less, libxml2, mpfr, pcre2, wget |
| 0.1.0 | 2019-01-26 | QEMU qcow2 image | busybox, xshell, bzip2, zlib, ncurses, diffutils, grep |
You should be able to run it using any common x86 emulator/hypervisor. QEMU/KVM, Bochs, VirtualBox and VMWare Player are known to work, with the latter two offering the best performance (Most testing is done on QEMU/KVM however).
Sample QEMU invocation:
qemu-system-i386 -accel kvm -vga qxl -m 1024 -cpu host -serial mon:stdio -device ac97 -drive file=xelix.qcow2,if=ide -netdev user,id=mnet0 -device virtio-net,netdev=mnet0