Astral

Astral is a 64 bit operating system with its own kernel written in C for the x86-64 architecture.

Features

• SMP capable preemptible kernel
• Networking (TCP, UDP, DHCP)
• POSIX compatibility
• Ports: X.org, fvwm3, gcc, bash, quake, vim and more
• Filesystems: tmpfs, devfs, ext2
• Block devices: NVMe, virtio-block
• Network devices: virtio-net

Current Goals

• FAT filesystems
• Audio
• Installation program
• Fully self hosting
• Multiple user support

Building

The build process only needs xorriso, curl, zstd and bsdtar on the host. All other needed packages will be installed/built on the container.

To build the project, run make. This will create a file named astral.iso

Running

You can download the latest release from github and run it in the virtual machine of your liking. For QEMU the following command is recommended: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -M q35 -m 2g -cdrom astral.iso

There are a few targets in the makefile to run Astral with qemu when built from source:

make run

make run-kvm

VirtualBox-specific instructions:

Set 1 CPU for the VM
After you've created a new VM from the iso file:
vboxmanage list vms
vboxmanage modifyvm <name of Astral VM> --hpet on
Then select "Astral (initrd)" from the boot menu