The FENIX Project

In the future, you'll be able to find downloads for three different manuals for FENIX: The FENIX Interface Manual (a printable PDF of the man pages, basically), The FENIX Architecture Guide (a guide to how I've actually got FENIX laid out, as a helpful guide for anyone who wishes to dig into how FENIX works), and The FENIX General Manual (a proper manual for the OS). For now, none of these are available. But, hey, let me tell you a bit about some of this stuff.

So, the interfaces are fairly standard. I mean, well, they are standard. I'm literally working off POSIX.2. If you wanna know how those utilities and functions work, just go read the POSIX standard/Single UNIX Specification. There will be other things, but those will come either as they need to be done (such as with mkfs), or after I finish the core (as with something like a COBOL compiler).

The architecture is currently in development. As it stands, it's a very basic kernel. It's barely got the GDT set up, it's not in protected mode yet, and I've not moved to higher half. The plan is a higher half kernel, with paging, in protected mode. Hardware is planned to go through an abstraction layer from which we can write device drivers. Many devices will be available as files, as in most UNIXes and UNIX-likes, including hard drives and TTYs. The naming scheme is tentatively that that Linux uses, but I might change some stuff up, particularly as it relates to hard drives. But, we're not there yet. FENIX is planned to have its own file system, FXFS, the FENIX File System. It's largely going to be based off the UNIX and MINIX file systems, perhaps with some extensions or updates. But, it'll be that kind of standard model, with inodes and all that. So, that's about all that I can really say about the architecture.

The general manual will be pretty large, and cover everything from installation, to using the command line, to the graphical interface and applications, should those be developed. Some things that might otherwise go in this manual might get split into their own, depending on how large they alone are.