A Unix-like operating system for x86_64: a kernel written from scratch, booted by Limine, running an unmodified Void Linux userland on top of it.
Nothing above the kernel is written here. The image is Void's own glibc packages, installed by Void's own package manager, on Void's own init. When one of them does not work, the kernel is wrong, which is a much better test than a userland built to suit it.
A monolithic kernel: virtual memory with copy-on-write fork, preemptive scheduling across every processor the firmware describes, ELF and a dynamic linker, signals, and a Linux-compatible syscall table.
On top of it, runit as PID 1 with udevd and agetty, Void's bash, coreutils, sudo, curl and htop, and a Weston desktop that gets the display through seatd, with Firefox a click away on the panel.
Loadable modules, so lsmod, modprobe and lspci -k answer what they answer
on Linux: the sound and RTL8139 drivers are .ko files that udev loads from the
device's own modalias.
Underneath: a block layer over IDE, AHCI, NVMe and USB storage, with GPT and MBR
partitions and a read-write ext3 root whose journal the kernel writes and
replays; IPv4 with both ends of TCP over RTL8139; a framebuffer console with
eight virtual terminals on Ctrl+Alt+F1..F8; Intel HD Audio behind ALSA; xHCI
keyboard and mouse; and real users, permissions and setuid. The virtio-gpu
driver scans the display out where it lies, and make run-virgl renders on the
host's own GPU through virgl.
make # kernel, sysroot and image
make run # boot itThe first build downloads a Void rootfs and about 600 MiB of packages. The sysroot has to be built as root, on a filesystem that can hold ownership and the setuid bit. See Build and Run if yours cannot.
It boots into Weston with Firefox already open. Ctrl+Alt+F2 leaves it for a
text console, where you can
log in as tunix / tunix or root / tunix, and Ctrl+Alt+F1 goes back.
| The boot menu | A text console |
|---|---|
 |
 |
kernel/ arch/ drivers/ fs/ net/ ipc/ tty/ lib/, and the core beside them
base-files/ what makes the Void sysroot into Tunix
support/ the sysroot and image builders, limine.conf, the font tool
docs/ how each part works, and the roadmap
GNUmakefile the whole build
The build finds sources by walking kernel/, so a new file needs no entry
anywhere; only its includes have to know how far down it sits.