ToAruOS (とあるOS)

とあるOS (ToaruOS) is a hobby Unix-like operating system. Development began in December of 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently a one-man effort. For a short time, the project was the focus of the UIUC SIGOps.

Both the kernel and userspace are included in this repository.

Community

IRC

For discussion, help with building or running the OS, and for up-to-date build verification, please join us in #toaruos on Freenode (irc.freenode.net).

Features

The とある kernel provides a number of standard features, including:

• Processes and threads
  • The kernel supports loading of static ELF binaries
  • Threads are scheduled by the kernel
• Shared memory
• Pipes and TTYs
• Virtual file system
  • /proc implementation similar to Linux
  • /dev entries
  • EXT2 filesystem for disk access
• Signals
  • Delivery is asynchronous from sending
  • Processed immediately during next context switch into receiving process

The included userspace also provides:

• A number of standard Unix utilities
• A graphical interface
  • Composited window manager
  • Limited widget toolkit
• Terminal emulator
  • Some xterm compatibility, support for 256 color palette, etc.
  • Anti-aliased text with FreeType
  • General support for UTF-8

Third-Party Software

とあるOS makes use of and supplies the following third-party packages:

• libpng - Used extensively by the native graphics library to provide wallpaper and icons.
• zlib - Dependency of libpng, but also generally useful.
• freetype - For rendering text using TrueType fonts.
• cairo and pixman - For accelerated and managed graphics.
• ncurses - Terminal control library, provides terminfo.
• Mesa - Implementation of OpenGL (only the software rasterizer is available).
• Vim - Popular text editor.

Additionally, a number of third-party software packages have been ported to とあるOS, but are not yet included in this distribution:

• Lua - Builds as-is
• MuPDF - See klange/toaru-pdfviewer (library must be cross compiled)

Screenshots

For a historical look at とあるOS, please see SCREENSHOTS.md.

Testing it Out

From some Linux hosts (Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora), you can clone the repository and run:

./build.sh

This will install the required dependencies, build the userspace libraries and toolchain, build the kernel, and give you a hard disk image.

You can then run make run or make kvm to run QEMU. An additional make run-config command is available that allows easy customization of the emulation environment through a config file (.config, see util/config-parser for available options).

While we only officially support QEMU, other environments - including actual hardware - should work given the appropriate tools. If you are eager to try とあるOS from a real machine, please use GRUB 2 and ensure that you provide the correct graphics payload options. You may find a sample GRUB configuration the image-builder directory.

User Accounts

The default root password is toor. There is also a regular user local with password local. While general system security is lacking, most system-modifying calls to the kernel require root privileges. When booting directly to a graphical terminal, the system will run in single-user mode and automatically log in as root. When running in graphical or VGA-terminal mode, a login screen is presented.

Cygwin

With some work, とあるOS is also known to build successfully under cygwin. Instructions are forthcoming.

Making modifications

If you have made modifications to the kernel or userspace, make will suffice to build a new image and kernel. build.sh should only be used once when first cloning. If you have made modifications to the system call bindings for newlib, run rebuild-newlib.sh from the toolchain directory, then rebuild userspace applications as necessray.

Prebuilt Images

Unfortunately, we are no longer able to host prebuilt images through GitHub. We are exploring other options for distributing pre-built images and are also working to provide an ISO distribution.

Building an Image for VirtualBox, etc.

An experimental, unsupported image building tool that will produce a "production-ready" image, including GRUB 2, is provided in the image-builder directory. The script, create-image.sh, must be run as root and will produce a 1GB raw disk image which be converted to other formats as needed.

Troubleshooting

If you have any issues at all while attempting to build とあるOS, or you would like help building on an unsupported platform, please join us on IRC (#toaruos@irc.freenode.net). Problems encountered while using the build scripts in an unsupported environment will not be considered bugs until thoroughly examined.

Dependencies

Kernel

To build the kernel, you will need yasm, clang, and GNU ld (which you undoubtedly have if you have clang or gcc).

Hard disks

You will need genext2fs to generate the EXT2 images for the hard disk drive.

Userspace

A toolchain is provided and can be built through build.sh; this script should be able to install its own dependencies on Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora. Other environments are not supported, but examination for the script should provide a reference point on what packages are necessary.

References

Here are some tutorials we found useful early on:

• James M's kernel development tutorials
• Bran's Kernel Development Tutorial
• Skelix's OS tutorial

Licenses

ToAruOS Itself

This project is released under the terms of the University of Illinois / NCSA Open Source License, an OSI- and FSF-approved, GPL-compatible open source license. The NCSA License is a derivative of the MIT license and the BSD license; it is reproduced here for your convenience:

Copyright (c) 2011-2013 Kevin Lange.  All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
     this list of conditions and the following disclaimers.
  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the
     documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  3. Neither the names of the ToAruOS Kernel Development Team, Kevin Lange,
     nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse
     or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior
     written permission.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
CONTRIBUTORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
WITH THE SOFTWARE.

Third-Party Packages

ToAruOS contains a number of third-party packages and software. As the number of third-party packages in the OS has increased drastically, I have moved the licenses to THIRDPARTY.md.