Hans-Georg Eßer: ULIX
A diary documenting the implementation of ULIX-i386
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Welcome to the ULIX blog.
Ulix (Literate Unix) is a Unix-like operating system currently in development at
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
I use D. E. Knuth's concept of
Literate Programming
for the implementation and documentation. The ultimate goal is a fully working system which can be
used in operating system courses to show students how OS concepts (such as paging and scheduling)
can be implemented. Literate programs are very accessible because they can be read like a book;
the order of presentation is not enforced by program logic or compiler restrictions, but instead
is guided by the implementer's creative process.
Ulix is written in C and assembler for the Intel architecture. Currently no source code is available because the project is in its early stages.
On this page I document my progress with the implementation.
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Navigation:
2012 |
2011 |
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| v0.03: Paging with Higher Half Kernel (12.08.2011) | |
It works: now the kernel uses virtual addresses starting at 0xC0000000 (the last of four
gigabytes). This is a preparation for allowing user mode code (processes) to run in the
lower 3 GBytes. It took me all a whole day to get this to work because my original code
did not setup enough page -> frame mappings; it mapped some virtual memory to [0..1MB], but
the system was loaded to [1MB..2MB], so after enabling paging nothing useful was found...
Now the next step will be user mode. For a starter I will just try to switch to user
mode and back; there's some meddling with the stack involved because Intel CPUs have
only one instruction that can be used to enter user mode: IRET (return from interrupt)
which finds the next instruction pointer on the stack. This will later turn into the
init process from which all other processes will be forked.
Another thing to think of now is memory allocation. When I start handling processes I will
need a list of free page frames, so the physical memory should be identified in the
beginning. There's a lot of untested frame allocation code in Felix Freiling's non-Intel Ulix,
so I'll look how that works on an Intel chip.
Resources used:
Higher Half With GDT, http://wiki.osdev.org/Higher_Half_With_GDT
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