Ghost Kernel

As you might have noticed, I've not been very active in the project within the last months. The main cause for this is that I've moved to a different city and got a new job and I was really quite busy.

Another reason is that I'm currently playing with the thought of starting a new kernel project in which I want to clean up a lot of the things that inevitably go wrong in such a big project. There are some smaller issues but there are also a few design flaws that I can't easily fix on the existing code base. The new project will incorporate a lot of the existing stuff for sure.

Once I've got all my thoughts together and know where this will be going, I will post an update here. If you have any suggestions of stuff that you would like to see in the new project, feel free to leave some comments!

The work on MeetixOS, the OS based off the current kernel is still continued by Marco. Check his page for updates meanwhile!

Few days ago, a fellow programmer contacted me and revealed a project he has started:

MeetixOS - an operating system derived from the Ghost OS. It extends the kernel with some features and adds various applications.

https://github.com/MarcoCicognani/MeetiX-OS-Project

It is nice to see what's possible with the kernel already and what the Marco was able to build on top of it. Great work!

I'm very interested to see which way this project will go and how we can collaborate together.

Keep it up!

Sources version 0.5.6 are now in the GitHub repository! You can download the current demo file on the download page.

Made some improvements to the kernel and fixed a few minor issues in the libc and libapi. Improved how command line arguments are passed when loading binaries. Previously, the initialization routine running before the user's main function had to parse the arguments - now they are already parsed by gosh (the new Ghost shell) and provided bite-sized to the executable.

Most time was spent finishing the new terminal (that now responds well to escape sequences) and then starting a port of GNU bash. It depends on quite some POSIX/Unix functions that I had to implement/still have to implement to get it running. It compiles well now and tells me its version, but there is still some stuff to do.

Last but not least, I added a fancy boot screen to make it look a little nicer when starting up ;-)

Happy new year to all of you! :)

I rewrote the terminal driver so that it now uses VT100 for output. With this it is now possible that applications can control their terminal window by sending escaped commands.

This also allowed me to finally separate the shell implementation from the terminal itself (it was basically a "built-in shell" before). The shell is now found in gosh - the Ghost shell. This shell is still work-in-progress but will soon be enriched with various features.

What you see in the screenshot is a little demo - I ported the Duktape JavaScript interpreter and made it run a script. I'm thinking about using this as a replacement for what bash/sh usually do, but this is just an idea for now.

After debugging for many hours, I finally got the canvas implementation to work nicely. It is now possible to perform drawing on a free canvas from any application. This is implemented using shared memory between applications and the window server.

The new canvas implementation finally allowed me to add a GUI mode for the terminal!

Here's a little video of it in action. It's still a bit laggy though :o)