monolithium

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What is Monolithium?

Monolithium is a 32-bit operating system for x86 PCs. It is not a Unix-like system, and shares almost nothing with the Unix architecture. Written completely from scratch, it is completely incompatible with other operating systems. Currently, only the Monolithium kernel is implemented. The other major components, the "system library" and "system manager", are still missing.

Monolithium wasn't implemented according to any existing design, it was more or less designed as it was implemented, so the current interface may not be consistent. During this phase of its development, its kernel module interface and application programming interface are not stable and subject to major changes.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1) Why write another OS from scratch?

Most software development today is focused on assembling software from existing "building blocks", using libraries and high-level programming languages, which are designed to be complex and generic because they need to cover a lot of use cases. Simplicity is a very useful trait that is often overlooked. Monolithium is one of the few operating system projects with simplicity as its primary goal.

2) Why is there no development history?

I started this project in 2011, before I understood how VCS systems work and why they're important. I made backups at regular intervals, but since I didn't use git, there are no commits before the first release.

3) Will the interface ever become stable?

Having a stable interface, which will not change to the extent that later versions break software running in userspace, is one of the end goals of the project.

COMPILING

Run the "setup" script to download, configure, and locally install required packages, then run "make". To speed things up, use the -j flag to compile with more threads in parallel.

Prerequisites:

• A POSIX-compatible environment.
• An internet connection (to download required packages).