The Aleph Operating System

The Aleph Operating System, or Aleph OS, is a hobby operating system written in Rust. It is the successor to Myros. It is dual-platform, running on x86-64 PCs and Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. Note that PC builds do not currently have legacy BIOS boot support.

WARNING: Aleph OS is provided without warranty of any kind (see LICENSE). I take no responsibility if running Aleph OS on real hardware bricks or otherwise damages your device.

Supported Rust Version

Building Aleph OS for x86-64 currently requires a nightly version of Rust, though the stable toolchain can currently be used for AArch64. Aleph OS requires the 2021 edition of Rust which was stabilized in Rust 1.56.0.

While the x86-64 version currently requires the nightly toolchain, I would like to eventually be able to build the entire OS without the use of unstable features. Currently I'm only using one unstable feature (build-std), but there are a few unstable features that I would rather not do without. They include the following:

• build-std. This is currently used for x86-64, because Rust doesn't currently support the x86_64-unknown-none target, let alone provide pre-built libraries. I and others are working on changing that.
  • Not required for AArch64 since it has tier 2 support.
  • "Adding Rust-Stable libstd Support for Xous" documents a possible stable workaround for x86-64 until x86_64-unknown-none gets tier 2 support.
• asm. This feature appears to be on a path to stabilization, but I don't know when that might happen.
  • Not currently used, but I expect to make heavy use of this feature.
  • Alternatively, I could put all assembly code in separate assembly files and import them using extern "C".
• naked_fns. I would think this feature would be stabilized eventually, but I don't know that for sure.
  • Not currently used, but I expect to use this feature for interrupt handlers.
  • Alternatively, I could put trampoline functions in separate assembly files and import them using extern "C".

Building Aleph OS

As mentioned above, building Aleph OS for x86-64 requires a nightly verison of Rust. If you don't already have the nightly channel installed, you can install it with the following command:

rustup toolchain install nightly

Aleph OS also uses the build-std feature for x86-64. Using this feature requires the rust-src component, which can be installed with the following command:

rustup component add rust-src

After the above components are installed, go to the project's root directory and run one of the following commands:

make # defaults to x86-64
make arch=x86_64
make arch=aarch64

If you have QEMU installed, any of the following commands will run it in a QEMU virtual machine:

make qemu #defaults to x86-64
make qemu arch=x86_64
make qemu arch=aarch64