Nox

Welcome! Nox is a hobby kernel developed by two guys with a keen interest in kernels and operating systems. This is our common project that we work on as much as time and life allows. It is most definitely not ready for any sort of real world use.

What does it do now?

• Protected mode
• Paging (in the simpliest form)
• Interrupts
• PIT support for timing
• PS/2 keyboard
• Scan code Set 1 interpreter
• PATA read

What we're planning on doing

• Terminals (multiple, text and visual)
• Threads
• User mode
• USB stack
• PATA Write support
• Networking

Running it

After building, just hit make run to test in Bochs.

Building

make Yes, it's that simple! Make creates a harddrive image file with the following:

• Custom MBR
• FAT16 Filesystem with a custom VBR
• A slimmed down version of the kernel acting as bootloader (BOOT.SYS)
• A 32-bit elf kernel (kernel.elf)

Build requirements:

• Bochs (2.6.6+ recommended)
• Nasm (2.10.09+ recommended)
• mtools
• gcc (See note at the bottom of this file)
• mkdosfs
• make

Configuring Bochs

The default configuration for Bochs does not enable everything required to run nox, to ensure Nox runs correctly, please configure Bochs with the following:

./configure --enable-usb --enable-x86-64 --enable-sb16 --enable-debugger --disable-debugger-gui

Note:--disable-debugger-gui is a personal preference and not required, the remaining options are all required to run the kernel. For an explanation of the available options see the Bochs documentation.

GCC

See GCC Cross-Compiler for instructions on building a cross compiler required to build this project.

Contributors

• Simon Gustavsson
• Philip Stears