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TinyOS Hobby Kernel
===================

TinyOS Hobby Kernel "tinyKern", a hobby, AArch64 kernel. tinyKern is intended
to be loaded by the tinyBoot bootloader, which is currently closed-source but
compiled binaries are published under the Releases tab of this repository.

This README outlines some initial design ideas/goals for tinyKern, with more
detailed documentation located under the docs/ directory. The following are
some general design ideas for tinyKern:

 * Much is inspired by XNU, with some influence from Linux too, both in the
   kernel design and source code flow.
 * UNIX-like, Hybrid kernel.
 * Absoloutely NO predefined platform information. Whereas tinyBoot heavily
   relies on a platform description and platform-specific code, this kernel
   must be loadable on various platform configurations, as long as a device
   tree is present.
 * Will rely on Flattened Device Tree, maybe ACPI too in the future.
 * Must be loaded by tinyBoot, as described in docs/booting.txt.
 * Some kind of minimal Libc implementation.
 * Please, come up with a better name other than "tinyKern".

Some further design ideas that will have dedicated design docs are a Tiny-O
executable file format, instead of using ELF, as well as a TinyImage wrapper
for encrypted and compressed kernel images.


** Drivers **

The way kernel drivers will work is not yet determined. I'm currently leaning
towards the way U-Boot handles drivers. More on this will be documented as
I come up with ideas. Some drivers such as Graphics, Filesystem, Networking
etc will be implemented as seperate drivers - not as part of the Kernel
source.


** Source Tree **

The general source code layout will probably look something like this:

 * arch/        AArch64-specific assembly, C, etc.
 * kern/        Kernel Core.
 * machine/     Machine API.
 * platform/    Platform API (TBD, see docs/booting.txt)
 * ipc/         Inter-process communication.
 * vm/          Virtual Memory Subsystem.
 * lib/         Library (libfdt, libc, etc)