#meta #educational

app rustmetos

Rustmetos, A meta operating system written in rust for educational purposes only

1 stable release

1.0.0 Jan 14, 2022

#434 in Operating systems

MIT license

12KB
226 lines

RustMetOS

To get it up and running, install standard rust compiler using rustup and then run the following commands in below sections to build certain components.

Build

Standard Distribution Archive

you also need python installed to run the build script. Python 3.7 should be the minimum requirement

Unix

cd {Root of the project}
cd rustmetos_std
python3 build.py
cp target/archives/standard.zip ../standard_dist.zip

Windows

cd {Root of the project}
cd rustmetos_std
py -3 build.py
copy target\archives\standard.zip ..\standard_dist.zip

Rustmetos Binary

Unix / Windows

cd {Root of the project}
cd rustmetos
cargo build --release

the above should create a rustmetos or rustmetos.exe file under {root of project}/rustmetos/target/release/

Simply run the executable generated and when asked for standard distribution archive, provide absolute path to the standard archive that we built using the commands before. The archive should be in the root of the project after the steps were followed.

Guide

A Simple guide to administrating this system. Let's start at the step when we are done installing and building. Now we are on Rustmetos Shell as it says after loading the init configuration.

Let's study the directory structure of the Standard Installation. Standard installation comes with a few directories at root one of the important ones is /bin/ and /conf/. The first contains binaries neccessary to administrate the system and the latter contains basic configurations. one of them is init.conf. It contains the following content by default:

[exec]
name=sh

in the above configuration it defines a section named exec which defines what executable to run at begginning of the program. By default it is internally harcoded to be internal:core_shell so that user has at least some way to work with the sytem without any installation. sh is an extension to that with multiple other features.

you can always delete the configuration or within the sh you can type boot set internal:core_shell which just modifies this configuration to boot into core shell on boot.

In core shell, help can be typed to list all the commands. The commands in core shell are concrete and are never expected to be improved in feature but that is not the same for sh. It is expected to improve with time and have multiple features into it. You can do one very important thing in core shell and that is to reset. As soon as you type that, home is destroyed and is left only to be recreated on next boot. The system has lost all the memories and is back, fresh as new.

Below this guide you will find the list of commands provided in standard distribution and in the order of there creation.

Standard Commands

sh

Shell for short. Just invoke it as is and it will lead you to an interactive prompt that can be used to do further more powerfull tasks that can be done in core shell.

To invoke it within the core shell:

exec sh

boot

Boot command provides a simple configuration modification utility for the exec section of init.conf. It allows for one command as of now which is to set the boot executable.

You might wanna use it to switch between core shell and sh or any other custom executable such as an init system.

Switch to core shell from sh

boot set internal:core_shell

Switch to sh from core shell

exec boot set sh

read

Reads from a file and prints to the console. It is more of a copy of cat {file} from unix but way underpowered than cat. You can use it to read any file in usually text format to standard output.

Reading the init.conf in sh

home
read conf/init.conf

unzip

Unzips a zip file into a provided directory. For example given a file named example.zip you can use this to extract its contents to a folder.

Extracting example.zip to a folder called my_example in sh

unzip example.zip my_example

Contributing

Contribution is a neccessary motivation and heart of any open source project. This project was just meant to be educational as I needed some sort of purpose to learn rust with. I encountered multiple situations while its development only to help me learn and understand rust better. So this project serves the purpose of motivation to me to learn rust but any contributions are welcomed because I have my flaws and I would be greatful to learn about them.

The best way to contribute would be to improve existing software or improving this single page documentation. The secondary way to help would be to introduce more executables to the standard distrubtution.

Dependencies

~2–11MB
~96K SLoC