Essence — An Operating System

Video demonstration as of October 2021, running on real hardware: (YouTube)

Links

For discussion, join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/skeP9ZGDK8.

Alternatively, visit the forums (not very active): https://essence.handmade.network/forums.

Supporters

To support development, you can donate to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nakst.

Essence was a recipient of the prestigious 2021 Icculus Microgrant. You can view more details here: https://icculus.org/microgrant/.

Testing

You can download and test the latest nightly build from https://github.com/nakst/build-essence/releases. Download and extract Essence.tar.xz. If you are using VirtualBox, import Essence.ova. If you are using Qemu, run

qemu-kvm -drive file=drive,format=raw -m 2048 -smp 2 || qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -drive file=drive,format=raw -m 2048 -smp 2

These builds are configured to run on emulators only, to make testing easier. Builds for real hardware are coming soon :)

Building

See help/Building.md for a description of how to build and test the system.

Features

Kernel

• Filesystem independent cache manager.
• Memory manager with shared memory, memory-mapped files and multithreaded paging zeroing and working set balancing.
• Networking stack for TCP/IP.
• Scheduler with multiple priority levels and priority inversion.
• On-demand module loading.
• Virtual filesystem.
• Window manager.
• Audio mixer. (being rewritten)
• Optional POSIX subsystem, capable of running GCC and some Busybox tools.

Applications

• File Manager
• Text Editor
• IRC Client
• System Monitor

Ports

• Bochs
• GCC and Binutils
• FFmpeg
• Mesa (for software-rendered OpenGL)
• Musl

Drivers

• Power management: ACPI with ACPICA.
• Secondary storage: IDE, AHCI and NVMe.
• Graphics: BGA and SVGA.
• Read-write filesystems: EssenceFS.
• Read-only filesystems: Ext2, FAT, NTFS, ISO9660.
• Audio: HD Audio.
• NICs: 8254x.
• USB: XHCI, bulk storage devices, human interface devices.

Desktop

• Custom user interface library.
• Software vector renderer with complex animation support.
• Tabbed windows.
• Multi-lingual text rendering and layout with FreeType and Harfbuzz.