Ghost is an operating system for the Intel x86 platform. The project is licensed as GPLv3. It was started as a research project to learn more about low-level software programming and computer internals. This repository is occasionally updated with the new sources.

The kernel and the userspace applications are written from scratch in C++ and Assembly (and some C). The kernel is not based on any existing kernel and not Unix-compatible. There is a relatively small POSIX.1 compatibility layer that allows porting some software to the system though.

The most advanced features are SMP support (symmetric multiprocessing) to run on multiple processors, a v8086 monitor for executing BIOS calls (which also introduced VESA support), support for ELF binary loading (including thread-local-storage and all the other little things), as well as signal support. And there is a fancy little GUI that makes it all good-looking :-)

This is the bleeding edge source version of April 12, 2017. Version 0.5.6

• Pure micro-kernel
• Multiprocessor- & multitasking support
• IPC - pipes, signals, messages, shared memory
• Window server (GUI with homemade toolkit)
• Patched GCC (OS specific toolchain)
• self-made libc
• libghostapi, extensive kernel API library
• libstdc++ port
• libghostuser for simplified file I/O, creating UIs & more...
• VESA video driver
• PS/2 keyboard & mouse driver
• ELF binary support
• Userspace filesystem driver support
• Serial COM1 kernel logging
• Virtual 8086 for BIOS calls
• Copy-on-write implementation, fork()

See the documentation folder for documentation. It contains information about the technical design as well as building instructions.

If you want to get in contact, contribute to the project or have any questions, feel free to contact me at:

[email protected]

-Max Schlüssel