Hydra

Introduction

Hydra is a microkernel with the main goal of keeping the codebase as small and simple as possible. A smaller codebase can be easily maintained and is less prone to bugs or issues, and modern monolithic kernels tend to be tremendously big (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD). Being a microkernel drivers can be written in any language by exposing the kernel API and then run in userspace, this keeps all the system a lot more modular.

Building

To build Hydra you need clang and lld. If you want to generate an ISO bootable image you also need xorriso and for testing in a virtual machine qemu is also needed.

After all the requirements are satisfied you can just fire the make command. The Makefile supports these targets:

• all (compile and link libc and hydra)
• sys (just compile the kernel)
• libc (just compile libc)
• test (compile all and run the os in qemu)
• debug (same as test, but let qemu wait for a gdb connection)
• gdb (run gdb with a configuration so that it automatically connects to qemu)
• clean (remove generated files)

Status

• Interrupt handling
• Dynamic memory allocation
• Virtual memory management
• ACPI table parsing
• APIC configuration
• HPET timer
• Userspace
• IPC
• Process management
• Disks management daemons (SATA, NVME)
• Filesystem daemons (fat32, hydra-ufs)
• VFS daemon
• POSIX compatibility daemon