News

• 18-April-2008:  Further development of GeekOS will take place at http://code.google.com/p/geekos/.  This site (geekos.sourceforge.net) will remain to host older versions of GeekOS.

• 17 Oct 2006.  Building GeekOS on recent versions of cygwin is broken (due to apparent bugs in cygwin's binutils).  A workaround is to use a cross compiler and binutils that targets i386-elf directly.  A prebuilt one for cygwin systems is available from:

  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~daveho/i386-elf-gcc.zip

  To use it:

  1. Unpack the zip file in the root directory of your C: drive
  2. Comment out the cygwin support section of the GeekOS Makefile
  3. Set the TARGET_CC_PREFIX macro in the GeekOS Makefile to i386-elf-
  4. Make sure that your PATH includes /cygdrive/c/binutils-i386-elf.

  I have alerted the binutils maintainers of the problem, so hopefully we'll see a fix in the near future.

• Older news...

What is it?

GeekOS is a tiny operating system kernel for x86 PCs.  Its main purpose is to serve as a simple but realistic example of an OS kernel running on real hardware.  (Actually, most of the development is done on the Bochs emulator.)

The goal of GeekOS is to be a tool for learning about operating system kernels.  As of version 0.2.0, it comes with a set of projects suitable for use in an undergraduate operating systems course, or for self-directed learning.  GeekOS has been used in courses at a number of colleges and universities.

How do I get it?

Go to the downloads section, or use the Australian mirror: HTTP, FTP.

What do I need to run it?

Check out this page for detailed instructions on how to build GeekOS on Linux/i386, FreeBSD, Windows, and Unix platforms.

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