Fiwix is an operating system kernel written from scratch, based on the UNIX architecture and fully focused on being POSIX compatible. It is designed and developed mainly as a hobby OS and, since it serves also for educational purposes, the kernel code is kept as simple as possible for the benefit of students and OS enthusiasts. It is small in size (less than 50K lines of code), runs on the i386 hardware platform and is compatible with a good base of existing GNU applications.
The command needed to build the Fiwix kernel is make clean ; make
. This will create the files fiwix (the kernel itself) and System.map.gz (the symbol table) in the root directory of the source code tree.
Before compiling you might want to tweak the kernel configuration by changing the default values in include/fiwix/config.h
and include/fiwix/limits.h
.
Keep in mind that the kernel doesn't do anything on its own, you need to create a user-space environment to make use of it. Upon booting, the kernel mounts the root filesystem and tries to run /sbin/init
on it, so you would need to provide this program yourself. Fortunately, FiwixOS provides a full user-space UNIX-like environment to test the Fiwix kernel.
You can proceed to install FiwixOS on a hard disk either by booting from the CD-ROM or from a floppy. If you chosen the latter, you will also need the Installation CD-ROM inserted in order to install the packages that form all the system environment.
Let the system boot and when you are ready, just type install.sh
.
The minimal hardware requirements are as follows:
Please keep in mind that this is a kernel in its very early stages and may well have serious bugs and broken features which have not yet been identified or resolved.
Let me repeat that.
Please keep in mind that this is a kernel in its very early stages and may well have serious bugs and broken features which have not yet been identified or resolved.
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*** USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! ***
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Fiwix is free software licensed under the terms of the MIT License, see the LICENSE file for more details.
Copyright (C) 2018-2023, Jordi Sanfeliu.
Fiwix was created by Jordi Sanfeliu.
You can contact me at jordi@fibranet.cat.