ToaruOS is a "full" operating system for x86-64 PCs and experimental support for ARMv8.
At the end of last year I shared here on the blog the news of the launch of an operating system that caught the attention of many, this system has the name of ToaruOS, that the interesting thing about this OS is that it is written from scratch and provided with its own kernel, boot loader, standard C library, package manager, user space components, and a graphical interface with a composite window manager.
Initially, the project was developed at the University of Illinois as a research work in the field of creating new composite graphical interfaces, but later it was transformed into an independent operating system.
About ToaruOS
In the heart of ToaruOS there is a kernel that uses a hybrid modular architecture which combines a monolithic base and means to use loadable modules, in the way most available device drivers are designed, such as disk controllers, file system, keyboard, mouse, network cards, sound chips, and plug-ins for VirtualBox guests.
The kernel supports Unix threads, TTY, virtual file system, /proc pseudo file system, multithreading, IPC, ramdisk, ptrace, shared memory, multitasking, and other common features.
The system is equipped with a composite window manager, supports dynamically linked executable files in ELF format, multitasking, a graphics stack, can run Python 3 and GCC. ext2 is used as the file system. The bootloader is compatible with BIOS and EFI. The network stack enables BSD-style socket APIs and supports network interfaces, including loopback.
of native applications highlights the vi type bim code editor, which has been used for the last few years to develop ToaruOS-specific applications such as a file manager, a terminal emulator, a graphic panel with support for widgets, a package manager, as well as libraries for supported images (PNG, JPEG) and TrueType fonts.
For ToaruOS programs like Vim, GCC, Binutils, FreeType, MuPDF, SDL, Cairo, Doom, Quake, Super Nintendo emulator, Bochs, etc.
Main novelties of ToaruOS 2.1
The release of the new version of Toaru OS 2.1 version in which added initial support for the AArch64 architecture (ARMv8), including the experimental ability to use ToaruOS on the board Raspberry Pi 400 and in the QEMU emulator.
Another change that stands out is that the processing and passing of signals to processes has been redesigned in user space, plus calls to sigaction, sigprocmask, sigwait, and sigsuspend have been implemented.
In addition memory management has been improved in user space, as well as network stack and terminal rendering, lazy rendering has been implemented and a glyph cache for TrueType fonts has been added.
Mechanisms for setting the clock have also been added, including the settimeofday system call and expanded capabilities of the date utility.
Of the other novelties that stand out in this new version:
- Added munmap system call.
- The composite manager has a blur effect and redesigned event handling when the window is resized.
- Support for configuring IPv4 addresses and routing configurations has been added to the ifconfig utility. ICMP socket support.
- Added support for the recvfrom function for UDP and ICMP sockets.
- Added the ability to work with USB keyboards in the bootloader.
- An item to delete files has been added to the context menu of the file manager.
- Improved display of graphics on the system monitor.
- Added grep utility with support for regular expressions.
- Improved ps command output (additional columns added).
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you should know that the code of the project is written in C and is distributed under the BSD license, you can also consult the details In the following link.
Download and get ToaruOS 2.1
For those interested in testing this new version, it has prepared a live image for download, 14,4 MB in size, which can be tested in QEMU, VMware or VirtualBox.
The link is this.