hhuOS

Introduction

Welcome to hhuOS, a small operating system written in C++ and Assembler for the x86-architecture. The main purpose of this project is to show how different aspects of operating systems theory can be implemented and linked together. The system is not aimed to be a full-featured operating system for daily use.

This is a project by the Operating Systems group at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

Run without building

We provide nightly builds of our master and development branches via GitHub Releases. Execute the following commands to download and run the latest master build in QEMU (on Ubuntu 22.04):

sudo apt install wget qemu-system-x86
mkdir -p hhuOS
cd hhuOS
wget https://github.com/hhuOS/hhuOS/releases/download/nightly-master/hhuOS-master.tar.gz
tar -xzf hhuOS-master.tar.gz
./run.sh

The OS will boot into a shell with some UNIX-like commands. Run ls /bin to see all available applications. Try out bug and battlespace for some old-fashioned games!

Build from source

GCC (>=7), CMake (>=3.14) and some other dependencies are required to compile hhuOS. To install them, you can run the following command (on Ubuntu 22.04):

sudo apt install build-essential nasm gcc-multilib g++-multilib cmake python3 python3-distutils xorriso dosfstools mtools unzip wget git

Afterward, clone this repository and execute the included build-script:

git clone https://github.com/hhuOS/hhuOS.git
cd hhuOS
./build.sh

To test hhuOS in QEMU, simply execute the included run-script:

./run.sh

What next?

Congratulations! If you have made it this far, you have successfully compiled and run hhuOS! If you have not done so yet, you should definitely try out the included games bug, battlespace and dino, as well as the demo command, to see the capabilities of our user space game engine.

When you are done tinkering with the OS, why not try to build your own application for hhuOS? Our wiki provides tutorials on how to set up a development environment and get started with app development for hhuOS.