ToaruOS 1.0.3 released

ToaruOS 1.0 was released 18 days ago, and since then, several bugfix releases have been released. The latest release – the one you want to test – is 1.0.3.

ToaruOS is a complete hobby operating system, including a kernel and userspace with many graphical applications. This is the first release considered to be “user-ready”, but please keep in mind that ToaruOS is a hobby project and it may not be stable or suitable for any purpose you might have for an operating system. This release represents the culmination of many years of development, research, and learning.

IT’s a remarkably fun operating system, and runs without any problems in VirtualBox. I’ve played with it a bit during the day, messing around with the basic but elegantly simple UI, browsing the file system, installing a few packages through the graphical package manager, and playing some Quake. It’s rare for hobby operating systems to achieve this level of functionality in a 1.0 release, so colour me pleasantly surprised.

ToaruOS’s kernel in its current form is 32-bit, non-SMP, monolithic (but modular), and Unix-like. It supports processes, threads, shared memory, files, pipes, TTYs, packet-based IPC, and basic IPv4 networking. Driver modules allow for access to EXT2 and ISO9660 filesystems, PATA and ATAPI disk access for hard drives and CDs, framebuffer support on most virtual machines (as well as bootloader-assisted generic framebuffer support), networking on AMD PCnet FAST, Realtek RTL8139, and Intel PRO/1000-series NICs, PS/2 mice and keyboards, audio on Intel AC’97 chipsets, as well as special support for VirtualBox’s guest additions.

The userspace includes a dynamic linker, a full-featured compositing windowing system, many Unix-like utilities, a port of Python 3.6 (including many binding libraries for the ToaruOS windowing environment), and several graphical applications (including a package manager).

The code’s on github.