Vinix

Vinix is an effort to write a modern, fast, and useful operating system in the V programming language.

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Download the ISO

You can get a continuously updated ISO of Vinix here.

What is Vinix all about?

• Keeping the code as simple and easy to understand as possible, while not sacrificing performance and prioritising code correctness.
• Making a usable OS which can run on real hardware, not just on emulators or virtual machines.
• Targetting modern 64-bit architectures, CPU features, and multi-core computing.
• Maintaining good source-level compatibility with Linux to allow to easily port programs over.
• Exploring V capabilities in bare metal programming and improving the compiler in response to the uncommon needs of bare metal programming.
• Having fun.

Roadmap

• mlibc
• bash
• builds.vinix-os.org
• gcc/g++
• V
• nano
• storage drivers
• ext2
• X.org
• X window manager
• V-UI
• network
• Intel HD graphics driver (linux port)

Build instructions

It is highly recommended to just download an ISO from: https://builds.vinix-os.org/repos/files/vinix/latest/vinix.iso

These instructions are for building Vinix, which may take a long time and require some debugging on Linux distros that weren't properly tested for build.

The tested distributions are: Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux.

Building Vinix on macOS, *BSD, or other non-Linux OSes

This build system does not support OSes other than Linux, due to how various packages interact with the host distro during their build process. Pull requests making the build capable of successfully working on non-Linux OSes are welcome, alternatively, run the build in an x86_64 Linux VM or real hardware.

Distro-agnostic build prerequisites

The following is a distro-agnostic list of packages needed to build Vinix.

Keep in mind that the following packages should be relatively up to date, so older distros may not work despite the following packages having been installed.

Skip to a paragraph for your host distro if there is any.

GNU bash, GNU coreutils, GNU make, GNU patch, GNU tar, GNU gzip, GNU binutils, GCC, G++, git, subversion, mercurial, curl, wget, xz-utils, nasm, mtools, meson, ninja, perl, m4, texinfo, groff, gettext, autopoint, expat, bison, flex, help2man, openssl, gperf, rsync, xsltproc, python3, python3-pip, python3-mako, python3-xcbgen, xorriso, and qemu to test it.

Build prerequisites for Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives

sudo apt install bash coreutils make patch tar gzip binutils gcc g++ git subversion mercurial curl wget xz-utils nasm mtools ninja-build perl m4 texinfo groff gettext autopoint libexpat1-dev bison flex help2man libssl-dev gperf rsync xsltproc python3 python-is-python3 python3-pip python3-mako python3-xcbgen xorriso qemu-system-x86

Since the meson version from the repositories may be outdated, install it from pip3:

pip3 install --user meson

Build prerequisites for Arch Linux and derivatives

sudo pacman -S --needed bash coreutils make patch tar gzip binutils gcc git subversion mercurial curl wget xz nasm mtools meson perl m4 texinfo groff gettext expat bison flex help2man openssl gperf rsync libxslt python python-pip python-mako xcb-proto xorriso qemu-arch-extra

Installing xbstrap

It is necessary to fetch xbstrap from pip3:

pip3 install --user xbstrap

Building the distro

To build the distro which includes the cross toolchain necessary to build kernel and ports, run:

make distro

This step will take a while.

It is possible to skip this step. Running the next step, in that case, will build a minimal set of packages to create a minimal usable system only.

Building the kernel and image

Simply run

make

To test

In Linux, if KVM is available, run with

make run-kvm

In macOS, if hvf is available, run with

make run-hvf

To run without any acceleration, run with

make run