Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

Summary

What \ Arch i386 riscv64 x86_64 (build) Tests Toolchain debian N/A Toolchain fedora N/A Toolchain archlinux N/A Toolchain openSUSE N/A Contents Overview What is Tilck? Tilck is an educational monolithic kernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level. It runs on i686 and RISCV64 at the moment. Project's small-scale and simple design makes it the perfect playground for playing in kernel mode while retaining the ability to compare how the very same usermode bits run on the Linux kernel as well. That's a rare feature in the realm of educational kernels. Because of that, building a program for Tilck requires just a gcc-musl toolchain from bootlin.com. Tilck has no need to have its own set of custom written applications, like most educational kernels do. It just runs mainstream Linux programs like the BusyBox suite. While the Linux-compatibility and the monolithic design might seem a limitation from the OS research point of view, on the other side, such design bring the whole project much closer to real-world applications in the future, compared to the case where some serious (or huge) effort is required to port pre-existing software on it. Also, nothing stops Tilck from implementing custom non-Linux syscalls that aware apps might take advantage of. Future plans In the long term, Tilck might become widespread for embedded systems on which a fully deterministic and ultra low-latency system is required. With a fair amount of luck, Tilck might be able to fill the gap between Embedded Linux and typical real-time operating systems like FreeRTOS or Zephyr. The kernel already runs on RISCV64 and at some point it will be ported to the ARM family. It might be adapted to run on MMU-less CPUs as well. Tilck would be a perfect fit for such use cases because consuming a tiny amount of RAM has always been a key point in Tilck's design. Indeed, the kernel can boot and run on a QEMU machine with just 3 MB of memory today. In addition to that, adding a basic support for networking...