Cottage is an experimental operating system which features a kernel-space web server. The goal is to create an OS whose userspace is created primarily using JavaScript running in a browser. This simplifies application development dramatically, as application authors get access to everything a browser has to offer in terms of UI components.
See TODO for how much of the vision has been implemented so far, it's meant as a rough "roadmap" of what I'm working on.
Cottage, as the name implies, is supposed to be my cozy digital home away from home. The idea of the overall project is to inspire others to build their own digital homes and grow a little digital village, carving out a corner of the internet for likeminded digital misfits and miscreants.
As it is my home, expect it not to be suitable for your purposes - however, feel free to look around and if you get inspired - fork this repo and make a cottage of your own!
If you want to watch live development happen, I am often in the discord streaming live while I write code. Feel free to pop in and say hi!
Download from the "Releases" page on github. The nightly release is the only version currently available.
All that is required is a BIOS that's capable of booting UEFI images, and a relatively modern X86_64 system.
To run a downloaded ISO image using qemu, run the following command:
qemu-system-x86_64 -M q35 -m 2G -bios $(OVMF_IMAGE) -cdrom $(IMAGE_NAME).iso -boot d
The OVMF image is up to you to provide, but usually can be found at:
/usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd
If it's not there, make sure you have the ovmf package from your distribution
vendor installed.
Running on Windows is not supported, though you're welcome to give it a go.
If you're brave enough to try it on real hardware, please post your results in the "show and tell" discussion forum, or on the discord!
This OS favours simplicity and stability over broad feature support, and will only implement as much as it strictly needs to in order to get the job done.
Web-first design enables us to do away with some pesky stuff like handling keyboard and mouse input ourselves (the browser can handily convert them to network packets for us), and also abstract away a lot of display technology since again, we're just rendering into a framebuffer and then sending that to someone else's software (the browser, again, and the OS its running on) and letting that software do the heavy lifting of working out resolutions, bitmap depth, and all that fancy jazz.
Clean, simple code that does the job and moves on is preferred over messy tangles.
The kernel is modular by design, and the modules follow a linux-y model of exposing (block) devices into the virtual filesystem, though neither ABI nor API compatibility with linux is a goal here.
We also prefer to implement as much of the OS in kernel modules or userspace as possible, rather than implementing stuff directly into the kernel. This is to keep the kernel itself lightweight and versatile, and also to prevent tying the kernel to a particular piece of hardware (as we always will be testing the kernel with zero modules loaded, so that no module becomes a strict dependency).
We'll use github CI to produce ISO images for download from tagged releases, which will occur whenever I feel like tagging and releasing. A nightly build may also be made available somehow, though you're welcome to build from source.
HDD images won't be produced automatically, you'll need to build these yourself.
All development happens on trunk (master/main/trunk), branches can be made from tagged releases if patches or backports are needed.
PRs are welcome, if you see something that could be improved then feel free to send me a PR and I'll take a look at it.
We'll set up a discord if anyone gets interested enough to want to join the project.
TBD
TBD