/Lyre

UNIX-like kernel and distro written from scratch

Primary LanguageCBSD 2-Clause "Simplified" LicenseBSD-2-Clause

Lyre

Lyre is an effort to write a modern, fast, and useful operating system.

*** Lyre is still pre-alpha software not meant for daily or production usage! ***

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What is Lyre all about?

  • Keeping the code as simple and easy to understand as possible, while not sacrificing performance and prioritising code correctness.
  • Making a usable OS which can run on real hardware, not just on emulators or virtual machines.
  • Targetting modern 64-bit architectures, CPU features, and multi-core computing.
  • Maintaining good source-level compatibility with Linux to allow to easily port programs over.
  • Having fun.

Screenshot 0 Screenshot 0

Photo by Pixabay

Download latest nightly image

You can grab a pre-built nightly Lyre image at https://github.com/lyre-os/lyre/releases

Make sure to boot the ISO with enough memory (3+GiB) as, for now, Lyre loads its entire root filesystem in a ramdisk in order to be able to more easily boot on real hardware.

Build instructions

Distro-agnostic build prerequisites

The following is a distro-agnostic list of packages needed to build Lyre.

Skip to a paragraph for your host distro if there is any.

GNU make, diffutils, curl, git, bsdtar, xorriso, and qemu to test it.

Build prerequisites for Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives

sudo apt install make diffutils curl git libarchive-tools xorriso qemu-system-x86

Build prerequisites for Arch Linux and derivatives

sudo pacman -S --needed make diffutils curl git libarchive xorriso qemu

Building the distro

To build the distro, which includes the cross toolchain necessary to build kernel and ports, as well as the kernel itself, run:

make distro-base # Build the base distribution.
make all         # Make filesystem and ISO.

This will build a minimal distro image. The make distro-full target is also avaliable to build the full distro; this step will take a while.

To test

In Linux, if KVM is available, run with

make run-kvm

In macOS, if hvf is available, run with

make run-hvf

To run without any acceleration, run with

make run