Vinix

Vinix is an effort to write a modern, fast, and useful operating system in the V programming language.

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What is Vinix all about?

• Keeping the code as simple and easy to understand as possible, while not sacrificing performance and prioritising code correctness.
• Making a usable OS which can run on real hardware, not just on emulators or virtual machines.
• Targeting modern 64-bit architectures, CPU features, and multi-core computing.
• Maintaining good source-level compatibility with Linux to allow to easily port programs over.
• Exploring V capabilities in bare metal programming and improving the compiler in response to the uncommon needs of bare metal programming.
• Having fun.

Note: Vinix is still pre-alpha software not meant for daily or production usage!

Download latest nightly image

You can grab a pre-built nightly Vinix image at https://github.com/vlang/vinix/releases

Make sure to boot the ISO with enough memory (8+GiB) as, for now, Vinix loads its entire root filesystem in a ramdisk in order to be able to more easily boot on real hardware.

Roadmap

• mlibc
• bash
• gcc/g++
• V
• nano
• storage drivers
• ext2
• X.org
• X window manager
• Networking
• Wayland
• Hypervisor
• V-UI
• Intel HD graphics driver (Linux port)

Build instructions

Distro-agnostic build prerequisites

The following is a distro-agnostic list of packages needed to build Vinix.

Skip to a paragraph for your host distro if there is any.

GNU make, findutils, curl, git, bsdtar, zstd, rsync, xorriso, and qemu to test it.

Additionally a working C compiler (cc) needs to be present.

Build prerequisites for Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives

sudo apt install -y build-essential make findutils curl git libarchive-tools zstd rsync xorriso qemu-system-x86

Build prerequisites for Arch Linux and derivatives

sudo pacman -S --needed gcc make findutils curl git libarchive zstd rsync xorriso qemu

Build prerequisites for Red Hat Linux and derivatives

sudo yum install -y gcc make findutils curl git bsdtar zstd rsync xorriso qemu

Build prerequisites for Void Linux and derivatives

sudo xbps-install -Suv gcc make findutils curl git bsdtar zstd rsync xorriso qemu

Building the distro

To build the distro, which includes the cross toolchain necessary to build kernel and ports, as well as the kernel itself, run:

make distro-base # Build the base distribution.
make all         # Make filesystem and ISO.

This will build a minimal distro image. The make distro-full target is also avaliable to build the full distro; this step will take a while.

To test

In Linux, if KVM is available, run with

make run-kvm

In macOS, if hvf is available, run with

make run-hvf

To run without any acceleration, run with

make run