ToAruOS (とあるOS)

とあるOS (ToAruOS) is a hobby operating system, built mostly from scratch, in development since December of 2010.

It was originally developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For a period of time, it was the development focus of the university's SIGOps chapter.

Both the kernel and core userspace are included in this repository. Third-party sources are downloaded during the build process.

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)
• SDL - See klange/SDL
• snes9x-sdl - See klange/snes9x-sdl
• Bochs
• Python - in progress...

Screenshots

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

Testing / Building / Installation

Please see TESTING.md.

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.