IFEM OS

Aspiring to be an operating system designed from the ground up for embedded/industrial applications with an emphasis on fault-tolerance. :-)

Introduction

IFEM is an experimental, work-in-progress, immature and early-stage operating system - you've been warned :-)

The idea behind IFEM is having an operating system where

• kernel is a minimal and thin piece of functionality
• modules and drivers don't know anything about each other beyond APIs and SPIs
• and there are no dependencies during compile and link time - instead pieces fit together only at run-time.

Current Status

Version 0.0.1 is the first release where "something works":

• bootloader loads the OS from the disk (image) into memory and hands the control over to kernel.
• kernel
  • does basic hardware init routine
  • enables the protected mode
  • sets up two interrupt handlers (timer and keyboard)
• interrupt handlers print the key-code on each keyboard interrupt and announce a message every 200 timer ticks.

Here's a recording of its execution:

How To Build

Using Gnu toolchain on a Linux box

Provided you have installed gcc (5+) and gcc-multilib (if on a x64 machine):

make clean all

No Gnu toolchain

Provided you have docker already installed:

$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/src -w /src -it gcc:9
# make clean all

How To Run

IFEM's "runnable" binary is ifem-os.img which you can find in the root of the source tree after a successful build.

Bochs

There's a bochsrc file included in the source tree - provided you fix the paths in that file to match your own Bochs installation, simply run bochs while inside the source tree.

Virtualbox

If you intend to run IFEM inside a vbox machine, you just need to boot your vm from ifem-os.img as a floppy disk image.

Physical machine

If you still have access to a machine with floppy drive, just write IFEM's binary to the floppy (e.g. dd) and boot your machine!