Wednesday, November 3, 2010

CTA Operating System news

The operating system has reached a new milestone. Some key features were created, here is this first preview.

The OS has it's own bootloader, which works much faster than GRUB. Multiboot support was removed, so GRUB doesn't work any more. Here is a screenshot at booting:


The operating system uses a Console user interface, GUI is planned to be added later in the project.

The shell includes a help system for the available commands. 
Also, the user input is more advanced than a typical console, it offers features such as insert/overwrite mode, or using CTRL for skipping whole words, features that are normal to any text editor.

The OS has a memory manager implemented, and also supports paging (so that would be physical + virtual memory manager).

The latest addition was the floppy driver, which supports 3 types of 3.5" disks, more exactly low density (720KB), double density (1.44M) and extended density (2.88M). Any other types are unsupported.
On the todo list there is FAT drivers, to make some order in this mess, and single tasking support (multitasking will be added later).

Finally, this is the kernel panic screen:
Later in the project, when GUI will be added, it will be replaced with a Screen Of Death.