r/kerneldevelopment

NexsOS1 is a multitasking operating system, with smp support for aarch64 and amd64, developed from scratch, the kernel is hybrid / monolithic with a tendency and research to be a microkernel, all applications (including the shell) are executables elf loaded from the file system, the system has been tested and stressed for hours with multiple processes running and is very reliable (we still have some kernel faults, but they have become very rare), the system was developed with all the means available in 2026, following a pragmatic approach and inspired by plan9, sel4, linux, windows nt, fucshia, macos and android, the system has a research purpose, and is basically simple and open source for projects that require an operating system with working graphics, and entirely readable without the accumulated complexity of linux, I do not consider myself an expert, nor one who wants to be, I just wanted to bring you a project that for me is fun and I am very fond of it

After about 2.5 weeks of banging my head against this (alongside building out NTK), I've got a proper AC97 driver in a solid state and wanted to share. The driver is interrupt-driven with a kernel mixer thread that handles up to 8 concurrent clients. Each client gets its own ring buffer and linear-interpolated sample-rate conversion to 48 kHz. One thing that bit me early on: QEMU's AC97 emulation doesn't actually apply the NAM register gains to the DMA stream, so volume control has to live in the software mixer path instead. Userspace talks to it through /dev/dsp using the standard OSS ioctls (SNDCTL_DSP_SPEED, SNDCTL_DSP_SETFMT, etc.) and just writes PCM. There's also a /dev/mixer node for master/PCM gain. I also wrote a simple utility that handles WAV and MP3 files (via minimp3), feeding into a ring of 32 pre-allocated 16 KB DMA buffers.

shit, almost forgot:

https://github.com/boredos

I have probably annoyed people with how often I post project updates (I get really excited and have no one else to tell lol) but I tried (again) and this time I have a clear vision in mind on what I want the end result to be so I'll (hopefully) stay motivated this time. I have been able to get a minimal shell running in userspace with some basic utility programs that really don't do much but I have a decent userspace heap and FD-based filesystem IO even if only via an initrd. My goal is to hopefully implement a basic TCP stack with the virtio-net hardware via QEMU and host a static web page. I have been trying to use AI less and write the code myself but I honestly still use it a lot to figure out how stuff works and to help me debug and correct code but, either way, it's basically written by myself.

GitHub repo