Vinix

Vinix is an effort to write a modern, fast, and useful operating system in the V programming language.

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What is Vinix all about?

• Keeping the code as simple and easy to understand as possible, while not sacrificing performance and prioritising code correctness.
• Making a usable OS which can run on real hardware, not just on emulators or virtual machines.
• Targeting modern 64-bit architectures, CPU features, and multi-core computing.
• Maintaining good source-level compatibility with Linux to allow to easily port programs over.
• Exploring V capabilities in bare metal programming and improving the compiler in response to the uncommon needs of bare metal programming.
• Having fun.

Note: Vinix is still pre-alpha software not meant for daily or production usage!

Download latest nightly image

You can grab a pre-built nightly Vinix image at https://github.com/vlang/vinix/releases

Make sure to boot the ISO with enough memory (8+GiB) as, for now, Vinix loads its entire root filesystem in a ramdisk in order to be able to more easily boot on real hardware.

Roadmap

• mlibc
• bash
• gcc/g++
• V
• nano
• storage drivers
• ext2
• X.org
• X window manager
• Networking
• Wayland
• Hypervisor
• V-UI
• Intel HD graphics driver (Linux port)

Build instructions

Distro-agnostic build prerequisites

The following is a distro-agnostic list of packages needed to build Vinix.

Skip to a paragraph for your host distro if there is any.

GNU make, findutils, curl, git, xz, rsync, xorriso, qemu to test it, and a working C compiler (cc) needs to be present.

Build prerequisites for Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives

sudo apt install -y build-essential make findutils curl git xz-utils rsync xorriso qemu-system-x86

Build prerequisites for Arch Linux and derivatives

sudo pacman -S --needed gcc make findutils curl git xz rsync xorriso qemu

Build prerequisites for Red Hat Linux and derivatives

sudo yum install -y gcc make findutils curl git xz rsync xorriso qemu

Build prerequisites for Void Linux and derivatives

sudo xbps-install -Suv gcc make findutils curl git xz rsync xorriso qemu

Building the distro

To build the distro, which includes the cross toolchain necessary to build kernel and ports, as well as the kernel itself, run:

make all     # Build the base distro and make filesystem and ISO.

Note: on certain distros, like Ubuntu 24.04, one may get an error like:

.../.jinx-cache/rbrt: failed to open or write to /proc/self/setgroups at line 186: Permission denied

In that case, it likely means apparmor is preventing the use of user namespaces, causing jinx to fail to work. One can enable user namespaces by running:

sudo sysctl kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0

This is not permanent across reboots. To make it so, one can do:

sudo sh -c 'echo "kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns = 0" >/etc/sysctl.d/99-userns.conf'

This will build a minimal distro image. Setting the PKGS_TO_INSTALL env variable will allow one to specify a custom set of packages to build/install. For example:

PKGS_TO_INSTALL='*' make all

This will build all packages (may take some time). Or:

PKGS_TO_INSTALL='python sqlite' make all

This will build the base system (like make all) plus the python and sqlite packages.

To test

In Linux, if KVM is available, run with

make run-kvm

In macOS, if hvf is available, run with

make run-hvf

To run without any acceleration, run with

make run