vkernel is a subproject of the Veracyon Project. Veracyon is the name of the wider Operating System, whereas vkernel is the name of the kernel itself. The name is short for veracyon kernel.
The entire project is a hobbyists endevour and should not be regarded as suitable for day to day use (if for no other reason than it doesn't do a whole lot yet). However it is my aim to continue this project and reach a point in which the entire project is self-hosting and could be used for basic day to day use.
I will not talk about the goals and aims of the wider Veracyon Project, as there are a couple of differences in its goals (as the wider project includes more than just a kernel).
vkernel will hopefully be the culmination in much of the knowledge I've learnt regarding OS development, and be the foundation to much of my future work in this area. My hope is to make the kernel portable. I don't mean the same binary working on multiple architectures, but for much of the code base to be common between architectures. Currently the kernel only supports the i386 architecture, but I'm trying to structure the code in such a way that other architectures, such as x86_64 or ARM can be added in the future with minimal headaches.
Currently the plan is to produce a "hybrid" kernel. I'm not sure I want to pursue a full microkernel design, but I also don't want to end up with a monolithic kernel either. Where this balance will end up being, I'm not entirely sure yet. It will depend on how development goes.
I also want to support both newer and older features and functionality, with the kernel attempting to use newer features and then falling back to older ones if required.
There is a lot of work to do in vkernel before it is ready for much of anything. There are a few core aspects that need to be added.
- CPU Identification & Topology
- Handling interrupts (not just ACK'ing them)
- Core hardware support (PS/2, ACPI, PCI, etc)
- Ramdisk for essential components not built in to the kernel (filesystems, etc)
- Threading / Multitasking
- Processes
- Symetric Multiprocessing (SMP)
- User-Space
- System Calls
- OS Specific Toolchain
- Security (SSP, etc)
Copyright (c) 2018-2019 Tom Hancocks
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