SerenityOS

Graphical Unix-like operating system for x86 computers.

About

SerenityOS 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 us, for us, based on the things we like.

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

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

I'm also on Patreon and GitHub Sponsors if you would like to show some support that way.

Screenshot

Kernel features

• x86 (32-bit) kernel with pre-emptive multi-threading
• Hardware protections (SMEP, SMAP, UMIP, NX, WP, TSD, ...)
• IPv4 stack with ARP, TCP, UDP and ICMP protocols
• ext2 filesystem
• POSIX signals
• Purgeable memory
• /proc filesystem
• Pseudoterminals (with /dev/pts filesystem)
• Filesystem notifications
• CPU and memory profiling
• SoundBlaster 16 driver
• VMWare/QEMU mouse integration

System services

• Launch/session daemon (SystemServer)
• Compositing window server (WindowServer)
• Text console manager (TTYServer)
• DNS client (LookupServer)
• Network protocols server (ProtocolServer)
• Software-mixing sound daemon (AudioServer)
• Desktop notifications (NotificationServer)
• HTTP server (WebServer)
• Telnet server (TelnetServer)
• DHCP client (DHCPClient)

Libraries

• C++ templates and containers (AK)
• Event loop and utilities (LibCore)
• 2D graphics library (LibGfx)
• GUI toolkit (LibGUI)
• Cross-process communication library (LibIPC)
• HTML/CSS engine (LibWeb)
• JavaScript engine (LibJS)
• Markdown (LibMarkdown)
• Audio (LibAudio)
• PCI database (LibPCIDB)
• Terminal emulation (LibVT)
• Out-of-process network protocol I/O (LibProtocol)
• Mathematical functions (LibM)
• ELF file handling (LibELF)
• POSIX threading (LibPthread)
• Higher-level threading (LibThread)
• Transport Layer Security (LibTLS)
• HTTP and HTTPS (LibHTTP)

Userland features

• Unix-like libc and userland
• Shell with pipes and I/O redirection
• On-line help system (both terminal and GUI variants)
• Web browser (Browser)
• C++ IDE (HackStudio)
• IRC client
• Desktop synthesizer (Piano)
• Various desktop apps & games
• Color themes

How do I read the documentation?

Man pages are browsable outside of SerenityOS under Base/usr/share/man.

When running SerenityOS you can use man for the terminal interface, or help for the GUI interface.

How do I build and run this?

See the SerenityOS build instructions

Before opening an issue

Please see the issue policy.

Communication hubs

The main hub is #serenityos on the Freenode IRC network.

We also have a project mailing list: serenityos-dev.

Author

• Andreas Kling - awesomekling

Contributors

• Robin Burchell - rburchell
• Conrad Pankoff - deoxxa
• Sergey Bugaev - bugaevc
• Liav A - supercomputer7
• Linus Groh - linusg
• Ali Mohammad Pur - alimpfard
• Shannon Booth - shannonbooth
• Hüseyin ASLITÜRK - asliturk
• Matthew Olsson - mattco98
• Nico Weber - nico
• Brian Gianforcaro - bgianfo
• Ben Wiederhake - BenWiederhake
• Tom - tomuta
• Paul Scharnofske - asynts
• Itamar Shenhar - itamar8910
• Luke Wilde - Lubrsi
• Brendan Coles - bcoles

(And many more!) The people listed above have landed more than 100 commits in the project. :^)

License

SerenityOS is licensed under a 2-clause BSD license.