News

23-Apr-2018

The wait is finally over!

After a lot of years working on this project, I can finally offer a free UNIX-like kernel for students and OS enthusiasts out there. I really hope people will take it with the same excitement I had while writing it.

The Fiwix kernel comes with a CDROM that will install a decent operating system with libraries, compilers and tools. All the user-space software in this operating system uses the Newlib C Library successfully ported to Fiwix. Since such library is not fully compatible with the GNU C Library, the amount of GNU packages ported is small. That's the reason why you'll see some tools (applets) from the Busybox.

The primary file system is the Minix version 2. It's an old and feature limited file system but it's really easy to implement and is currently enough to hold all files of the operating system. It has some limitations though; the maximum size of a file system is 1GB, it can only contain 65,535 inodes, etc.

This kernel, while completely functional and self-hosting capable, is in its early stage. That is, don't expect some features you would find in the current (modern) kernels. So, no PCI devices, no USB support and no networking, to name the most impacting missing features.

OK, enough reading. Download it and get your hands dirty with the Fiwix kernel.

Happy hacking! ;-)

Just for the record, the latest changes from 0.9.2 to 1.0.0 were:

1.0.0 - 23-Apr-2018
===================
- Fixed a bug in reclaim_buffers() to avoid kernel freeze.
- Fixed a corruption bug when creating the dirent structure in the dir_readdir()
  functions.
- Massive code cleaning.
- New system calls:
	sys_select