Zero Kernel {#mainpage}

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Zeke is a tiny Unix-like operating system implementation that has grown up from a tiny single-user CMSIS-like embedded operating system.

Live Demo:

https://zeke.now.sh

Key Features

Kernel
- Fully pre-emptible kernel mode
- Object-oriented thread scheduling system
- One-to-one kernel threads for user processes
- freeBSD-like sysctl interface
Processes
- ASLR
- Copy-On-Write virtual memory
- Per process capabilities
- Unix-like fork and exec
- elf32 support
- Linux-style elf32 core dumps
IPC
- Signals
- mmap
- pipes
- pty
File Systems
- Complete file system abstraction (VFS)
- FAT12/16/32 support
- Fast RAM file system
- MBR support
- freeBSD-like device file interface
Userland
- Mostly C99 compliant libc
- Standard user application separation by using POSIX processes
- System call based kernel services

Port Status

+-----------+-----------------------+
| HAL       | Status                |
+-----------+-----------------------+
| ARM11     | OK                    |
+-----------+-----------------------+
|   BCM2835 | OK                    |
+-----------+-----------------------+
| MIPSel32  | -                     |
+-----------+-----------------------+
|   JZ4780  | -                     |
+-----------+-----------------------+

Compiling and Testing

Prerequisites

To successfully compile Zeke, you'll need the following packages/tools:

GNU make >3.8
llvm 3.3 or 3.4
clang 3.3 or 3.4
binutils 2.24
- arm-none-eabi
- mipsel-sde-elf
bash
mkdosfs and mtools for creating a rootfs image
cloc for source code stats
ncurses-devel

doc-book target

LaTeX + various packages
latexmk
gnuplot

Doxygen targets

Doxygen
man for viewing man pages

Compiling

configure- Set defaults for files in config dir
make all rootfs - Compile the kernel, user space and create a rootfs image
make kernel.img - Compile the kernel
make world - Compile only the user space without creating a rootfs image
make opttest - Compile on target tests
make clean - Clean all compilation targets

Run make help for full list of targets and compilation flags.

$ KBUILD_DEFCONFIG=qemu_rpi_headless_testing.defconfig ./configure defconfig
$ ./configure menuconfig
$ make all -j4

KBUILD_DEFCONFIG can be set as any of the defconfig targest found under the defconfigs directory.

Finally you can build the rootfs image by running:

$ make rootfs

Running Zeke in QEMU

Qemu from rpi branch of git@github.com:Torlus/qemu.git repository seems to work best for BCM2835/Raspberry Pi version of Zeke.

$ ../src/configure --prefix=[PATH TO BIN] --target-list=arm-softmmu,arm-linux-user,armeb-linux-user --enable-sdl
$ make -j4 && sudo make install

Once you have Qemu installed you can run Zeke in Qemu by using the following build target.

$ make qemu

Running Zeke on real ARM

Zeke should boot just fine with, practically, any bootloader that is capable of loading a linux image. However, Zeke only supports ATAGs for gathering device information so some older bootloader may work better. Alhough ATAGs are optional therefore practically any bootloader should work if you run the build with configATAG unset.

happosade / zeke