Big changes upcoming…

I’ve decided to change what the kernel aims to be and how it will work. I’ve dropped full linux drop-in compatibility in favour of creating a clean, modern and optimized kernel which tries to fix design mistakes other kernels have already made.

New Design

The kernel will be POSIX-compatible, feature a namespaced VFS to seperate virtual files or devices like /dev/sda, /sys/class/hwmon, /proc/self/ and more from actual files. It will have namespaces like fs:/ for the actual file system, dev:/ for device files (like dev:/sda), vdev:/ for virtual devices (like vdev:/urandom) and more, including hw:/ for a modern hardware info interface, log:/ for a standardized logging interface and reg:/ for a global registry-like configuration system. Internally, the kernel will also feature KSTATE, a central static struct for storing everything the kernel uses. Also, ther kernel will move from strictly limine to a dynamic bootloader format, where each architecture has its own kernel_entry, which prepares the CPU and kernel into a common state (long mode, paging, …) and builds a standardized BootInfo struct, which then gets handed to kernel_main when it is called.

New Source Tree

I’m also currently working on massively reorganizing and cleaning up the kernel source, by for example standardizing where arch-specific code lands, categorizing and organizing the code better and more. Also, the kernel print system (kprint) is currently being rewritten to improve performance and integrate it into KSTATE.