Ghost (operating system)

Ghost
Developer Max Schlüssel
Working state Alpha
Source model Open source
Initial release 2014 (2014)
Latest preview 0.5.3 / May 13, 2016 (2016-05-13)
Marketing target Personal computer
Platforms IA-32
Kernel type Micro kernel
License GPLv3
Official website ghostkernel.org

Ghost OS is a free and open-source[1] operating system for personal computers. It is under development since 2012[2] and currently compatible with the x86 platform.

The system is based on a microkernel named "Ghost Kernel" and features symmetric multi-processing and multitasking.

Design

The architectural concept of the kernel focuses on implementing a "pure" microkernel which only allows user-space threads to run with appropriate permissions and doesn't support kernel level threads. Many of the functionalities that are usually integrated in the kernel in a monolithic or hybrid system are implemented as user-space applications. All drivers and some vital components (like the program spawner) are running as such processes. This approach was chosen to avoid system crashes due to faulty accesses, hardware uses or memory corruption.

Executables

Loading executables is done by the spawner process. The current implementation supports the loading of static 32-bit ELF binaries.

Kernel interface

The kernel provides an application programming interface that is used for all inter-process communications and system commands. Driver processes access this interface to manage memory or request direct resource access. The interface functions are C-compatible.

Library support

A custom implementation of the standard C library (libc) is provided with the operating system. This implementation incorporates the Math library (libm) from the musl C library. The C++ standard library (libstdc++) is available as a default part when setting up the Ghost specific compiler toolchain.

For compatibility reasons, the C library implementation is partially POSIX-compliant. The toolchain allows porting of various third-party libraries.

References

  1. ↑ "Sources, released on GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-07-28.
  2. ↑ "First public demo release of version 0.3.0, OSDev forums". forum.osdev.org. Retrieved 2016-07-28.
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