Panda

A hobby operating system written in Rust, exploring OS design concepts with a focus on rich IPC and structured data pipelines.

Features

• UEFI boot with higher-half kernel
• Preemptive multitasking with full context switching
• Message-passing IPC with channels (bidirectional, 4KB messages) and mailboxes (event aggregation)
• Structured pipelines where tools exchange typed Value objects (tables, styled text, etc.) rather than raw bytes
• Scheme-based resource system with unified device paths (keyboard:/pci/input/0, block:/pci/storage/0)
• Integrated compositing GUI with virtio-gpu backend
• Read-only ext2 filesystem with async I/O

Building

Requires Rust nightly and QEMU.

make build    # Build kernel and userspace
make test     # Run all tests
make run      # Run in QEMU

See docs/BUILDING.md for detailed build instructions.

Project structure

panda-kernel/       # Kernel source
panda-abi/          # Shared syscall definitions and types
userspace/libpanda/ # Userspace library
userspace/terminal/ # Terminal emulator
userspace/init/     # Init process
docs/               # Documentation

Documentation

• BUILDING.md - Build commands and custom targets
• TESTING.md - Writing and running tests
• SYSCALLS.md - Syscall ABI and conventions
• IPC.md - Channels, mailboxes, and process communication
• PIPELINES.md - Structured Value-based pipelines
• DEVICE_PATHS.md - Unified device path scheme

Status

This is an early-stage hobby project. It boots, runs programs, and has a working terminal with basic utilities (ls, cat, hello). Contributions and feedback are welcome.

Licence

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.