Features

• Mostly written in C language (Assembler only used in the needed parts).
• GRUB Multiboot Specification compliant.
• Full 32bit protected mode non-preemptive kernel.
• For Intel 80386 processors and higher.
• Real multitask (kernel tasks at level 0).
• Protected task environment (independent memory address per process).
• Interrupt and exception handling.
• POSIX signals.
• Interprocess communication with pipes.
• Virtual memory management up to 4GB (no swap yet).
• Demand paging with Copy-On-Write feature.
• Linux system calls compatibility.
• Linux ELF-386 executable format support (statically and dynamically linked).
• Round Robin based scheduler algorithm (no priorities yet).
• VFS abstraction layer.
• Linux EXT2 filesystem support (read only) with 1KB, 2KB and 4KB block sizes.
• Linux PROCfs filesystem support.
• PIPEfs pseudo-filesystem support.
• ISO9660 filesystem support with Rock Ridge extensions.
• Support for RAMdisk devices.
• Support for SVGAlib based applications.
• Keyboard driver with predefined English and Spanish/Catalan keymap layout (hard coded).
• Parallel port printer driver support.
• Floppy disk device driver and DMA management.
• IDE/ATA hard disk device driver (read only).
• IDE/ATA ATAPI CDROM device driver.

Hardware Requirements

The minimum system requirements to use GNU/Fiwix are as follows:

• Standard PC architecture.
• Intel IA-32 and compatible processors (80386 and higher).
• 3MB of RAM memory.
• Floppy disk (3.5" with 1.44MB).
• Keyboard (US or ES/CA).
• VGA graphics adapter.