ToaruOS-NIH is a distribution of ToaruOS which contains no third-party components. Its bootloader, kernel, modules, C library, and userspace applications and libraries are all written by the ToaruOS development team and direct contributors.
This distribution aims to eventually replace the core of the mainline ToaruOS, with the various third-party components building against our own C library. This is a long-term project, and developing the C library to the point where it is useful for this purpose is not expected to be completed for quite some time.
ToaruOS-NIH comes with a graphical desktop environment with a compositing window manager, a featureful terminal emulator, a shell, several command-line tools, a text editor (with syntax highlighting), a dynamic loader, and can host Python 3.6 (which is included in pre-built CD releases). The kernel and included drivers support ATA hard disks and CD drives, ext2 filesystems, ISO 9660 filesystems, PS/2 mice and keyboards, RS232 serial, Intel e1000, RTL8139, and AMD PCNet-series network chipsets, TCP/IPv4, several virtual graphical framebuffers (including Bochs/QEMU and VMware, and support for framebuffers initialized by EFI), advanced VM integration (including absolute pointing devices in VMware, QEMU, and VirtualBox, as well as automatic display resizing, "Seamless Desktop" and hardware cursors in VirtualBox specifically), an implementation of the `/proc` virtual filesystem, Unix-style pipes and TTYs, shared memory, in-memory read-write temporary filesystem, Intel AC'97 audio (with a mixer), and more.
Releases are occasionally posted on [GitHub](https://github.com/klange/toaru-nih/releases), and nightlies are available [from toaruos.org](https://toaruos.org/nih.iso).
It is recommended that you run ToaruOS-NIH in an emulator - specifically Qemu or VirtualBox, though some testing has been done in VMware Workstation (reasonable, but missing driver support) and Bochs (not recommended).
It is highly recommended, due to the existence of Guest Additions drivers, that you provide your VM with at least 32MB of video memory to support larger display resolutions - especially if you are using a 4K display.
All source code for the entire operating system is included in this repository.
### Kernel
The NIH kernel is essentially the same as the mainline kernel, though the PCI vendor and device ID list has been replaced with our own slimmed down version. This was the only third-party element of the ToaruOS kernel. Additionally, the headers for the kernel have been relocated from their original directories to facilitate a cleaner build. The NIH kernel should be considered the latest version of the ToaruOS kernel.
Mainline ToaruOS shipped with GRUB, which provided a multiboot-compatible ELF loader. To that end, our native bootloader also implements multiboot. However, as writing a feature-complete bootloader is not a goal of this project, the native bootloader is very limited, supporting only ATAPI CDs on systems with El Torito "no-emulation" support. It is not guaranteed to work on real hardware, but has been tested in QEMU, Bochs, VirtualBox, and VMware Player.
The userspace includes a work-in-progress C standard library, the ToaruOS native libraries, the compositor (using only in-house graphics routines), and various other first-party utilities and applications.
First, ensure you have the necessary build tools, which are mostly the same as mainline ToaruOS: `yasm`, `xorriso`, `genext2fs` (with Debian patches), `python`, `mtools` (for building FAT EFI payloads) and `gnu-efi` to build the EFI bootloader (I'll explore implementing necessary headers and functionality myself in the future, but for now just pull in gnu-efi and make my life easier).
No ABI or API compatibility is guaranteed through the development of ToaruOS-NIH. Until a larger corpus of third-party software is ported to our new C library, APIs may change to improve or simplify library use, or to fix bugs. Even kernel ABI compatibility is not guaranteed as system calls are improved or made more compliant with expectations of POSIX or the C standard.
ToaruOS's kernel is entirely in-house. Its userspace, however, is built on several third-party libraries and tools, such as the Newlib C library, Freetype, Cairo, libpng, and most notably Python. While the decision to build ToaruOS on these technologies is not at all considered a mistake, the possibility remains to build a userspace entirely from scratch.
- Enough C library support to port binutils/gcc (needs enough C to get libstdc++ working)
- Plugin systems for the compositor and general graphics APIs to support third-party libraries in the future (including support for Cairo as a backend for the compositor, PNG support in the graphics sprite API, Truetype rendering support through FreeType in the text rendering engine).
- Porting the complete native desktop experience from ToaruOS mainline (which mostly means porting Python prototype applications and libraries to C).
- **apps** - Userspace applications, all first-party.
- **base** - Ramdisk root filesystem staging directory. Includes C headers in `base/usr/include`, as well as graphical resources for the compositor and window decorator.
