Cthulhu OS

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” ― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Information

What is Cthulhu OS?

Cthulhu OS is minimalistic hobbyist OS. It uses it's own libc (KCLib). Its long term goal is to support user space applications.

What type of kernel does Cthulhu OS use?

Cthulhu OS uses Azathoth as its main kernel, which will be microkernel.

What is the point of Cthulhu OS?

The point is to have fun making a complete OS and then use it as replacement to current OSes.

What are Cthulhu OS's requirements

At the moment, Cthulhu OS only supports x86-64 architecture. Should work on both Intel and AMD, however, it was only tested on Intel. So far it was only tested on qemu/bochs, I do not recommend putting it on real hardware yet (not that it can do anything at the moment).

What is the status of Cthulhu OS?

Cthulhu OS is under heavy development. So far it has working long mode, paging memory, interrupt handling, symmetrical multiprocessing, interprocessor communication. What needs to be done (and probably more):

• Loading initrd
• Loading init and daemons
• Userspace mode
• Scheduling, Scheduling with SMP support
• Lots and lots of daemons
• Porting user space programs

Building Cthulhu OS

Compiling Cthulhu OS requires Unix-like environment (was not tested on windows, but will probably require cygwin).

Cthulhu OS cross compiler

Cthulhu OS requires it's own toolchain (x86-64-fhtagn-*). To compile one, these components are required to be present at these locations

• binutils version 2.24 in folder build-toolchain/sources/binutils/binutils-2.24
• gcc version 5.1.0 in folder build-toolchain/sources/gcc/gcc-5.1.0
• latest version of kclib, will be automatically downloaded from github

To build/rebuild toolchain, execute shell script build-toolchain/create-toolchain.sh in build-toolchain directory. After the compilation is done, you should have working C environment in toolchain directory and user-space clib in osroot directory.

Compiling kernel

Simply invoke make kernel in projects root directory. You need to have path to toolchain/usr/bin in your path for compiler to find x86_64-fhtagn-gcc and x86_64-fhtagn-as. Your environment has to provide nasm assembler (http://www.nasm.us) and working shell.

After compilation is done, you should have azathoth.img in build directory.

Compiling libnyarlathotep

libnyarlathotep is library used by daemons and other system components. You can create it by invoking make nyarlathotep.

After compilation is done, you should have libnyarlathotep.a and nyarlathotep.h in build/libnyarlathotep directory.

Running Cthulhu OS

Run environment

Cthulhu OS can be run on qemu (recommended version 2.5.0, as it was tested on it), bochs or real hardware (not recommended).

Cthulhu OS's kernel Azatoth requires initrd in its own file format. You can use provided python script mkfs.py to create initrd. This script is located in disk directory. mkfs.py requires python 2.7. To use mkfs.py you have to provide input directory and output file. Input directory's content will be packed into initrd output file, which should have name rlyeh.

Cthulhu OS requires GRUB 2 as its bootloader (since it is mixed 16-32-64bit elf) with multiboot support. If you do not have GRUB 2 to create new image, you may create 64MB empty disk file and then use bspatch to patch that empty disk file with disk.img.patch. Then you have to mount that image with offset 1048576. For more information check disk/update_image.sh.

Sample grub configuration is in directory boot, which you can copy into your boot partition.

initrd contents

initrd input directory must contain init directory containing init init file and directory init/daemons containing daemons to be loaded initially.

Running Cthulhu OS on QEMU

Simply invoke qemu-system-x86_64 -hdc <yourdiskimagefile> -m 128 -s -smp cores=<numbercores>,threads=<numberthreads>,sockets=<numsockets> -cpu Haswell,+pdpe1gb

For more information check debug.sh.