ZeldaOS.x86_64

ZeldaOS.x86_64

The 64bit version of ZeldaOS which is still written in C&GAS from scratch for study use. Its main goal this time is to support SMP and virtualization. it's able to run a game: tetris inside guest OS

how to build and run it?

It’s handy to run the demo within the root of the repository on a nested-virtualization enabled Linux host(how to enable it?):

#KVM='--enable-kvm --cpu host' ZELDA64=/path/to/repo CC=gcc-4.8 make run

to clean the build, run:

#KVM='--enable-kvm --cpu host' ZELDA64=/path/to/repo CC=gcc-4.8 make clean

Features Inventory

Arch:x86_64 features

• running in 64-bit long mode
• SMP boot orchestration.
• 64-bit IDT management
• 64-bit segmentation/GDT management
• Inter-processors Interrupt(IPI) management

Memory features

• Customed physical memory detection
• Level 4 paging(2MB pages and 4K pages)

Devices features

• Basic 16-color video buffer managment
• APIC(Advanced PIC) management(LAPIC and IOAPIC)
• Basic serial port output management

Kernel features

• cusomized bootloader(only support legacy BIOS boot)
• PXE boot supported with https://github.com/goupaz/pxeboot
• Synchronization primitives: spinlock…
• Processor-local storage and per-cpu framework.
• Kernel PANIC.

VM Monitor

• Basic vmx mode switch(realmode, protected mode and 64-bit long mode)
• Memory virtualization(with Intel VT-x EPT mechanism)
• APIC virtualization(in progress)
• IO emulation(PIO and MMIO)
• IO devices(serial port, video and keyboard), details can be found from wiki
• SMP virtualization(in progress)

screenshot of the demononstration.

The Game: Tetris running as guest OS:

ZeldaOS64 provides a normal video window to display some runtime information(TBC):

also we have pretty beautiful screen of death(like BSOD from Microsoft Windows, It’s derived from VMware ESXi vmkernel: Purple Screen of Death:PSOD)

the output of serial port is streamed like: