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The Jinue Microkernel

Work in progress: this is still very much incomplete.

Screenshot

Overview of Build Artifacts

The main build artifact that can be built from the code in this repository is the kernel image, which contains the kernel proper as well as the user space loader. The kernel image conforms to the Linux x86 boot protocol, which means it can be loaded by a bootloader intended for the Linux kernel, such as GRUB.

During the boot process, the user space loader expects an initial RAM disk to have been loaded in memory by the bootloader. This would usually be provided by the user in order to use the kernel. However, an initial RAM disk containing a test application can be built from this repository.

Finally, this repository makes it easy to run the kernel and test application in QEMU. For this purpose, it builds a bootable ISO image that contains the kernel image and the initial RAM disk.

Build Requirements

To build the kernel image and test application, you will need a Linux machine with GNU make and a C compiler that can create 32-bit x86 ELF binaries. This software is known to build with GCC and clang.

You will also need the Netwide Assembler (NASM).

If you wish to build the ISO image for use with QEMU, which is optional, you will need GRUB and GNU xorriso in addition to the above.

Run Time Requirements

To boot the Jinue microkernel, you will need either:

  • QEMU; or
  • A x86 PC on which you have sufficient privileges to configure the boot manager to load Jinue.

How to Build

This repository imports some dependencies as git submodules. To make sure these submodules are also cloned and initialized, you need to pass the --recurse-submodules option when you clone the repository.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/phaubertin/jinue.git

Alternatively, if you already cloned the repository without passing this option, you can clone and initialize the submodules separately with the following command:

git submodule update --init

Then, configure the source code and its dependencies. You only need to do this oncen not each time you build.

./configure

To build the ISO image for use with QEMU, build the qemu target with make:

make qemu

If you will not be using QEMU and only want to build the kernel image, this can be done with the default make target:

make

How to Run in QEMU

You can run the kernel and test application in QEMU using the qemu-run make target:

make qemu-run

Alternatively, if you don't want QEMU to show a window with the video output, or if you are on a machine without graphics capabilities, use the qemu-run-no-display target instead. The kernel logs to the serial port, which QEMU redirects to standard output.

make qemu-run-no-display

How to Install

If you will not be using QEMU for testing, you can copy the kernel image to /boot by running the following:

sudo make install

The file name and path of the installed kernel image file is /boot/jinue.

Optionally, if you will not be providing your own initial RAM disk file, you can install the test application initial RAM disk to /boot as well.

sudo make install-testapp

The file name and path of the installed RAM disk file is /boot/jinue-testapp-initrd.tar.gz.

Once this is done, you need to configure your boot loader/manager to load this kernel. Jinue uses the 16-bit Linux boot protocol, so you can configure your boot manager as if you were loading a Linux image with the 16-bit boot protocol (linux16 command if using GRUB).

For detail on the Linux boot protocol, see Documentation/x86/boot.rst in the Linux source tree.

Documentation

There is some documentation in the doc/ directory. It is still very much a work in progress.