Mako

Mako is an operating system for 32-bit x86-compatible computers. Among its features are:

• Linux-compatible ext2 and USTAR filesystems
• fully virtualized per-process address spaces
• pipes and signals for inter-process communication
• cooperative and pre-emptive multitasking -- multiple processes and multiple threads per process
• a graphical user interface
• a (mostly) UNIX-compatible C library
• a Lua interpreter and a port of DOOM
• graphical applications for navigating directories, editing files and executing programs

Mako is named after the mako shark, the fastest shark in the sea. The shortfin mako shark is classified as an endangered species by the IUCN -- learn more about shark conservation here.

'Mako' is also the name of the fictional source of energy from Final Fantasy VII.

Download

Download mako.iso and mako-hda.img from here.

Build from source

This build process has been tested on macOS and Arch Linux. It should work on most Linux-like platforms. If you have trouble building Mako, please reach out to me or raise an issue on this repository.

Steps:

1. Build or acquire a cross-compiling GCC toolchain that targets the i386-elf platform. This is the hardest and most time consuming step -- if you can find precompiled binaries of i386-elf-gcc and binutils for your platform, save yourself the effort and use them instead of building GCC from source. If you are building on macOS, use this Homebrew tap and skip step 2. After this is complete, you should have i386-elf versions of GCC and binutils:

$ i386-elf-gcc --version
i386-elf-gcc (GCC) 9.2.0
Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

$ i386-elf-ld --version
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.31
Copyright (C) 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) a later version.
This program has absolutely no warranty.

2. Install grub-mkrescue, which depends on xorriso and mtools to create bootable ISOs. Most (?) Linux distributions come with grub-mkrescue installed. (https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/)
3. Install NASM.
4. Clone the Mako repository and run the following commands:

./fetch-deps.sh
make user # Ignore warnings
./gen-hda.sh # Ignore the segfault message
make

5. You should now have the mako.iso and hda.img disk images!

Run it

Mako only works on qemu at the moment.

1. Install qemu.
2. Download the mako.iso and mako-hda.img disk images from the link above.

# At least 64M of RAM is recommended
qemu-system-i386 -cdrom mako.iso -m 256M -drive format=raw,file=mako-hda.img

Roadmap

TODOs:

• More+better documentation.
• QOL improvements.
• Many small misc. things in the code.

Long term goals:

• Full POSIX compliant libc.
• Port a C compiler.
• Network/audio stack.

Acknowledgements

Mako makes use of the following libraries and programs:

• This excellent printf implementation by Marco Paland: https://github.com/mpaland/printf
• LodePNG, the small PNG encoder and decoder: https://lodev.org/lodepng/
• The Lua programming language
• This very portable version of DOOM: https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric
• This small C compiler: https://github.com/rswier/c4

I wrote Mako to better understand how operating systems work and learnt a lot of cool stuff in the process. This project would not exist without:

• the osdev wiki and the friendly people of the #osdev IRC channel
• The little book about OS Development
• the very well-documented source code of ToAruOS, SerenityOS and many other hobby-OS projects.

License

All Mako source is distributed under the terms of the MIT License.