The Sortix Operating System =========================== Sortix is a hobby operating system. It was originally created as a tool to learn more about kernel and operating system design and implementation. Today is transforming into a real operating system. The standard library and kernel is rich enough that some third party software can and has been ported to Sortix. However, the system remains quite limited as of this writing. Many features are missing such as proper filesystem support, bitmap graphics, and networking. Proper filesystem support is currently being added. The system aims to be an Unix-clone and is heavily based on POSIX. However, I've drawn much inspiration from systems such as Plan 9, GNU/Hurd and MINIX. Indeed, I plan to construct a micro-kernel with user-space filesystems, per-process namespaces, replacing many system calls with filesystem nodes, and other exciting features. System Requirements ------------------- Sortix has very low system requirements. It also works well under virtual machines such as VirtualBox and Qemu. * A 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64 CPU. * A dozen megabyte RAM. * A harddisk or cdrom drive or support for booting from USB. * A multiboot compliant bootloader if booting from harddisk. * A Parallel ATA harddisk, if you wish to access it from Sortix. SATA is not supported yet. Features -------- The current development version of Sortix offers a traditional multi-process protected environment with round-robin scheduling. A quick and dirty shell is able to execute programs in foreground or background mode, handle IO redirection and piping the standard output of a process into the standard input of another. A real shell will be added as the system matures and I get around to finish the work in progress shell. A number of standard utilities are present such as cat, head, tail, clear, cp, column, kill, ls, rm, pwd, uname, echo, and uptime. There is even a number of non-standard utilities such as calc, help, init, kernelinfo, memstat, and pager. This collection of utilities will continue to grow as it matures and third party software is ported. I've currently had some luck porting gzip and parts of binutils. A number of small games is present and uses the VGA textmode to render ASCII graphics. Notably you can play two-player Pong, or single-player Snake, or the nice and turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main attraction of the system for non-technical people. The Sortix kernel has very basic filesystem support. The root filesystem / is simply a single-directory RAM filesystem. The init ramdisk is mounted read-only on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. A lot of work is currently going into implementing a fully-working kernel virtual file system able to outsource filesystem requests to user-space servers. Once this is completed we will be able to shape Sortix into a real microkernel based system. Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above). There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user exists). I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is in place. Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is a multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no framework in place for sharing it. Technical details ---------------- The system is mostly coded in C++, but also contains a few files in C. However, the user-land experiences a normal C programming interface as per POSIX. Executable files natively uses the ELF format used on GNU/Linux and other systems. There is no shared library support yet, but it'll be possible when I get around to implement copy-on-write memory, mmap(2) and swapping to disk. Building -------- To build the Sortix source code you need to install a few dependencies. First of all you need the GNU Compiler Collection (C and C++), GNU Make, and GNU Binutils. You then need to build and install the included macro preprocessor mxmpp somewhere in your PATH such as /usr/bin. If you wish to build the 32-bit version of Sortix, you need the Netwide Assembler (nasm) as parts of it hasn't been ported to the GNU assembler yet. You need a GNU/Linux build system to build Sortix, although, it wouldn't be difficult to port the build system to other platforms. You can then build the Sortix kernel and user-space utilities by running make in the Sortix root source directory. By default it will build to your CPU architecture (64-bit on 64-bit systems, 32-bit otherwise). Use CPU=x86 or CPU=x64 as arguments to make to control which target is built. To build a bootable ISO you need GNU GRUB 2, as that is used by "make iso" to generate the iso. In turn, GNU GRUB relies on xorriso to create the iso file. You can burn the ISO to a cdrom or dvd, or even dd(1) it onto a USB memory stick and boot from if it your BIOS supports it. You can also provide it to a virtual machine. Alternatively you can install the kernel binary and initrd in your /boot directory and configure GRUB to boot Sortix. Links ----- You can visit the official website at http://www.maxsi.org/software/sortix/ for more information and news. You can also download the newest release and cutting edge nightly builds. You can retrieve the current git master from our gitorious project page from https://gitorious.org/sortix/. License ------- Copyright(C) Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen and contributors 2011, 2012. The Sortix kernel, the filesystem servers, the initrd tools, the utilities, the games, and the benchmark programs are licensed under the GNU General Public License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version. The libmaxsi standard library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version. Sortix is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the gpl.html and lgpl.html files for more information.