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:
To (get the possibility to) port some Unix programs to Ghost, the kernel now supports fork(). This also led to extending the physical memory management a little to keep reference counts for pages that are shared between processes. There is now also copy-on-write for physical pages within the image and heap area of a process.
I've made some major changes to make updating this page a little easier, and also make it a little more beautiful. :)
Single-lined textfields do now work with full mouse-support, also there are checkboxes, labels and some other components. I added layout managers, which are similar to the ones of Java's Swing. Currently I work on shape painting and vectors to get some fast and scalable graphics for checkbox and stuff.
The kernel now supports multiple cores. This required some changes in the scheduling model and the use of locks for critical kernel sections; next will be some optimizations regarding these locking mechanisms to improve overall performance. Then I guess shared libraries will be the next major ToDo.
Today I started implementing multiprocessor support for Ghost. I'm switching from the older 8259 PIC to the new APIC and its counterpart, the I/O APIC. This included writing some logic to read the ACPI tables and get the necessary information from there - bad luck by now if you don't have a computer with ACPI tables or an APIC. I'll have to check if a PIC fallback makes sense.
The BSP's APIC and its timer are already working fine and the I/O APIC setup information is stored. Next I'll configure the I/O APIC so that it lets keyboard/mouse interrupts through, once this is done theres only the wonderful step of making the entire kernel reentrancy-safe left to actually get multiprocessor support. That's gonna be interesting!