"I'm so excited to meet you!"
Spinel is a simple operating system written to allow me to explore the wonderful world of systems programming. Currently, it only supports amd64, but more platforms are planned to be supported in the future, including i386.
You can see my current plans on the projects page.
Spinel was originally started in December 2019. That version of Spinel is still available on the original branch. In February 2020, I decided to restart development on Spinel to try and strive for a cleaner code base and a better memory manager. The reset reached feature parity at the end of that same month (2020-02-27) and was merged that day.
Eventually, I started to feel that C was holding back my ability to write an expressive operating system. I started thinking about porting the project to C++. Finally, in June 2020, I took the dive and rewrote Spinel for the second time, this time in Rust.
In short: Cargo's pretty handy, the freestanding environment is incredible, the language itself is pretty nice, and the safety guarantees are a nice bonus. :>
To build Spinel, you will need Cargo, the Rust package manager.
After getting set up, install the nightly build of Rust's toolchain, which contains several useful features that Spinel makes use of:
$ rustup toolchain install nightlyNow, you'll need rustc's source so that the core standard library crate
can be built:
$ rustup component add rust-srcAfter that, you'll need a few helper utilities (feel free to collapse these
into one cargo install command):
$ cargo install cargo-xbuild # For cross-compiling Rust's freestanding environment
$ cargo install llvm-tools-preview bootimage # To create the bootable disk imageThen, you can use cargo xbuild to build the disk image. If you have QEMU
installed, you can use cargo xrun to build the disk image and launch QEMU.
You can also use cargo xdoc to generate the documentation, and
cargo xdoc --open to view it.
Spinel is not in a usable state at the moment. However, I hope to get to user mode as soon as I can. Realistically, Spinel may never be in a state that it could serve as one's daily driver operating system... but I can dream. :P
If you just want to run Spinel, please see Building Spinel.
Right now, Spinel is in a very early state, so it is probably not too interesting to contribute to right now. However, if you are interested on getting on board once user mode applications are possible, please note that to prevent against flamewars, there is a basic code of conduct for contributors. These rules should be fairly obvious, but feel free to have a look at them.
Additionally, contributors will likely be interested in licensing information, which is available in the following section.
Spinel is licensed under the MIT license. This includes every file that comprises Spinel, unless it is overriden by a license included within the file or within a closer parent directory. In other words, to find the license for the file, look for a license in the file, then in its parent directory, then in that directory's parent directory, and so on until you hit the project root.
Contributors who do not wish to cede their copyright to the project's copyright holder (Ruby Lazuli Lord) may include licenses in files they have written. These licenses must be compatible with Spinel's MIT license. Any contributor who does not add a license will, as stated in the GitHub terms of service, implicitly cede their copyright to the project's copyright holder.
If someone wrote a signficiant amount of code, you write a significant amount of code alongside it (or replacing it) in the same file, and you wish to apply your own license to the file or you wish to add your name to a license already in the file, please consult everyone who edited the file previously.