Serenity

Graphical Unix-like operating system for x86 computers.

About

I always wondered what it would be like to write my own operating system, but I never took it seriously. Until now.

Serenity is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by me, for me, based on the things I like.

If you like some of the same things, you are welcome to join the project. It would be great to one day change the above to say "this is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like." :^)

I regularly post raw hacking sessions and demos on my YouTube channel.

Sometimes I write about the system on my github.io blog.

There's also a Patreon if you would like to show some support that way.

Screenshot

Current features (all under development)

• Pre-emptive multitasking
• Multithreading
• Compositing window server
• IPv4 networking with ARP, TCP, UDP and ICMP
• ext2 filesystem
• Unix-like libc and userland
• POSIX signals
• Shell with pipes and I/O redirection
• mmap()
• /proc filesystem
• Local sockets
• Pseudoterminals (with /dev/pts filesystem)
• Filesystem notifications
• JSON framework
• Low-level utility library (LibCore)
• Mid-level 2D graphics library (LibDraw)
• High-level GUI library (LibGUI)
• HTML/CSS engine
• Web browser
• C++ IDE
• Emojis (UTF-8)
• HTTP downloads
• SoundBlaster 16 driver
• Software-mixing sound daemon
• WAV playback
• Simple desktop piano/synthesizer
• Visual GUI design tool
• PNG format support
• Text editor
• IRC client
• Simple painting application
• DNS lookup
• Desktop games: Minesweeper and Snake
• Ports system (needs more packages!)
• Other stuff I can't think of right now...

How do I build and run this?

Make sure you have all the dependencies installed:

sudo apt install build-essential curl libmpfr-dev libmpc-dev libgmp-dev e2fsprogs qemu-system-i386 qemu-utils

Ensure your gcc version is >= 8 with gcc --version. Otherwise, install it (on Ubuntu) with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get install gcc-8 g++-8
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-8 800 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-8

Go into the Toolchain/ directory and run the BuildIt.sh script.

Once you've built the toolchain, go into the Kernel/ directory, then run ./makeall.sh, and if nothing breaks too much, take it for a spin by using ./run.

You can vastly reduce the build time of successive rebuilds of Serenity by installing ccache and exporting PRE_CXX=ccache

Bare curious users may even consider sourcing suitable hardware to install Serenity on a physical PC.

Later on, when you git pull to get the latest changes, there's no need to rebuild the toolchain. You can simply rerun ./makeall.sh in the Kernel/ directory and you'll be good to ./run again.

IRC

Come chat in #serenityos on the Freenode IRC network.

Author

• Andreas Kling - awesomekling

Contributors

• Robin Burchell - rburchell
• Conrad Pankoff - deoxxa
• Sergey Bugaev - bugaevc

(And many more!) Feel free to append yourself here if you've made some sweet contributions. :)

License

Serenity is licensed under a 2-clause BSD license.