cowos

Custom OS from scratch in C

Notes

Heavily UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Currently just boots and well, does nothing lol.

BUILDING

You'll need a few things:

LLVM/Clang (default C compiler)
LLD (linker)
xorriso (iso creation)
git
make

OPTIONAL:

qemu (for virtual machine)
LLDB (debugging purposes)

After acquiring those just run make and it'll do everything for you:

make

By default the kernel is compiled with debug symbols, if you would like to avoid this, you can simply override the CFLAGS:

cd kernel/ # it is recommended to go to the actual directory yourself
make CFLAGS="-s -O3 -pipe"
cd .. # return to root
make

Eventually in the future this will be changed to be something much more convienent, however for now the inclusion of debug symbols is nessacary for development.

RUNNING

There is now a script to automate running cowos, although it's quite simple right now, this is important for the future as cowos will eventually require a root partition and other things as it grows to userspace slowly. To run, simply run this in the root of the repository:

make run # This will require qemu

For developers, running with the DEBUG flag will launch lldb with qemu to help debug issues with cowos:

make DEBUG=1 run

if you do not like LLDB, I included a script called run-gdb in the scripts/ directory for the gdb fans out there. I personally want to keep this project as gnu-free as possible, since I want cowos to not be GNU/cowos, I want it to just be cowos. And this means that I will even avoid anything as simple as the debugger being used to be non-GNU. Run in the root like so:

./scripts/run-gdb

It will automatically exit qemu if gdb is exited, and by default gdb will run in tui mode.

Credits

Limine: modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager.

People

micl: random guy on the interweb in the LHL discord server gave me a free vga driver to use lol

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