Aero

Aero is a new modern, experimental, unix-like operating system written in Rust. Aero follows the monolithic kernel design and it is inspired by the Linux Kernel. Aero supports modern PC features such as Long Mode, 5-level paging, and SMP (multicore), to name a few.

Is this a Linux distribution? No, Aero runs its own kernel that does not originate from Linux and does not share any source code or binaries with the Linux kernel.

Official Discord Server: https://discord.gg/8gwhTTZwt8

Screenshots

Running DWM, mesa-demos and Alacritty in Aero!

Features

• 64-bit higher half kernel
• 4/5 level paging
• Preemptive per-cpu scheduler
• Modern UEFI bootloader
• ACPI support (ioapic, lapic)
• Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)
• On-demand paging

Goals

• Creating a modern, safe, beautiful and fast operating system.
• Targeting modern 64-bit architectures and CPU features.
• Good source-level compatibility with Linux so we can port programs over easily.
• Making a usable OS which can run on real hardware, not just on emulators or virtual machines.

How to Build and Run Aero

Please make sure you have a Linux host system before building Aero. If you are using windows, use WSL 2.

Dependencies

Before building Aero, you need the following things installed:

• rust (should be the latest nightly)
• nasm
• qemu (optional: required if you want to run it in the Qemu emulator)
• make

Hardware

The following are not requirements but are recommendations:

• ~15GB of free disk space (this will vary depending on the amount of packages you want to build)
• >= 8GB RAM
• >= 2 cores
• Internet access

Beefier machines will lead to much faster builds!

Getting the source code

The very first step to work on Aero is to clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/Andy-Python-Programmer/aero
$ cd aero

Building Aero

make distro-image
make qemu

# To build documentation run the following command. The documentation will be outputed
# to the `target/doc` directory.
#
# Optionally you can pass `open=yes` to open the documentation in the default browser.
make doc open=yes

Contributing

Contributions are absolutely, positively welcome and encouraged! Check out CONTRIBUTING.md for the contributing guidelines for aero.

License

Aero is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the LICENSE file for license rights and limitations.