AscentOS

AscentOS is a hobby operating system kernel for the x86_64 architecture, written in C and Assembly. It has grown from a minimal bootable kernel into a system with an X11 graphical environment, a basic networking stack, and audio support.

Current Status

The system is currently capable of:

• Graphics: Running an X11 server (Xfbdev) with the twm window manager, xterm, and xeyes.
• Networking: Full TCP/UDP support. Tools like wget work with SSL (via wolfSSL).
• Audio: Sound Blaster 16 and AC97 drivers are functional; capable of playing WAV files.
• Software Ported: A variety of Unix tools including Bash, coreutils, TCC (Tiny C Compiler), Lua, and Kria-lang.
• Kernel Features: SMP (multiprocessing), advanced memory management (PMM/VMM/Heap), and CoW fork support.

Current Goals

• Porting GCC: Enabling a native GCC toolchain to support full self-hosting.
• Full USB Support: Expanding beyond UHCI to support OHCI, EHCI, and xHCI controllers, along with a wider range of USB devices.

Prerequisites

To build the project on Linux, you'll need:

• make, gcc/clang, nasm
• git, curl
• xorriso (for ISO creation)
• qemu-system-x86_64 (for emulation)
• e2fsprogs (mkfs.ext3 and debugfs are required for disk image generation)
• python3
• rustc & cargo (only if you want to build kria-lang)

Building and Running

1. Build everything:

   make

   This prepares the musl-based cross-toolchain, builds the kernel, and generates the bootable ISO.

2. Run in QEMU:

   make run

Building Ported Software

To build the full suite of ported tools (Bash, X11, etc.), run these scripts in order:

./scripts/build-bash.sh      && \
./scripts/build-coreutils.sh && \
./scripts/build-lua.sh       && \
./scripts/build-tar.sh       && \
./scripts/build-tcc.sh       && \
./scripts/port-x11.sh        && \
./scripts/build-xeyes.sh     && \
./scripts/build-twm.sh       && \
./scripts/build-xterm.sh

Directory Structure

• kernel/: Core kernel source code.
• userland/: User-space applications and ports.
• scripts/: Build system and toolchain automation.
• initrd/: Initial files and configurations for the system boot.
• toolchain/: (Generated) Musl toolchain and sysroot.
• limine/: Bootloader source and binaries.

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Developed as an open-source project for educational purposes and OS development exploration.