Ghost Kernel

Phew, that was quite a piece of work. I've finally decided to move the virtual filesystem to kernel space. The drivers still run in userspace and communicate with the kernel through messages & mapped areas. Performance is good so far, but there are still quite some improvements to do.

Filesystem paths

I moved away from the prefix:// style of filesystem paths. A single root seems much more convenient and clean. Currently all mountpoints exist in the root.

Unix pipes

The kernel now also supports unix pipes, which are used for standard input/output of programs, the communication of programs with the old window manager and probably also for other things like mouse/keyboard event transfer from the driver to programs (terminal/window manager).

Terminal

I also improved the terminal of Ghost when run in headless mode. You can now create multiple terminals and switch between them using Ctrl + Tab.

The new version of the Capri script, the build system of the Ghost project, is now released on http://capri.ghostkernel.org/. This release contains a rewrite of the parser, interpreter and command line interface.

It has support for native functionality loaded from shared libraries, has a more flexible native binding and is more portable than the previous version. Feel free to ask any questions and report bugs to me.

Back to development, I came to the conclusion that it is a better solution to have the basic Ghost system functions (system calls etc.) that reside in the GhostAPI as plain C functions. This makes it more compatible and, well, C++ is not needed here.

This are at the moment ~60 functions, the previous ghost::SystemCalls interface is now deprecated. More details follow. Oh and, happy new year. :)

It's christmas time! Best time to implement some standard C functions. I'm doing some work to improve the window manager performance, and also fix some IPC stuff. But don't expect too much before christmas, its chill-time. :D

Currently I'm also implementing a terminal application, so you can run commands, maybe also Capri scripts soon.

The time has come! :)

I'm glad to announce the first demo release of Ghost. It demonstrates the boot process and the user interface. You can get the .iso from the downloads section! It's not a performance beast, but shows off what Ghost is capable of by now.

Here's a little video: