TomatOS

An experiment for writing a kernel with C# drivers and usermode, with a fully featured dotnet runtime running on baremetal with the main goal of using Type safety for memory safety.

Unlike other baremetal C# runtimes out there (For example Cosmos) we have a full garbage collector and JIT support in the kernel itself, so stuff like reflection/emitters and more will eventually be available for apps to use.

Progress

Kernel itself

Memory subsystem
- Freelist based physical memory allocator
- TLSF based kernel heap
- Single address space management
Threading subsystem
- Lightweight threading
- Mostly copied (translated) from Go
  - Scheduler
  - Synchronization primitives
  - Timer subsystem

Dotnet Runtime

We are using our custom dotnet runtime called TinyDotNet, for progress on it see its README

OS Design

Everything runs in a single cpu address space
- Threads are super light-weight and different assemblies have no context switch overhead.
Safety by Type system
- Accessibility/Visibility is enforced by the kernel at JIT time
  - If you don't have access to a field you have no way to get its value
- If you don't have a ref to an object and you can't create it yourself, you won't have any way to get a reference to it
Each assembly has one global instance, for GUI apps the window serveris going to simply notify you that you should open a new window/application instance.

Licenses

The Native Kernel is published under GPLv2
The Managed Kernel is published under LGPLv3
The Corelib is published under MIT
The .NET Runtime is published under MIT