Karion-OS

A minimal educational operating system with a shell interface and an inode-based file system.

Why This Project

Karion-OS was developed as a hands-on learning project to explore the fundamentals of operating systems. The focus is on:

• Understanding OS basics: Booting, memory, and system initialization
• Hardware interaction: Keyboard and VGA communication
• System design: Shell interface, I/O handling, and file system implementation
• C and Assembly integration: Combining low-level hardware control with high-level programming
• File system architecture: Inode-based storage, block allocation, and directory management

This project offers practical experience in systems programming and shows how OS components work together from boot to user interaction.

Features

• Command-line shell with prompt
• Inode-based file system (Xv6-inspired): block allocation, directory entries, file operations
• Memory allocator: heap-based dynamic memory management
• RAM disk: simulated block device storage
• Colored text output
• Keyboard input handling

Commands

• help — Show commands
• clear — Clear screen
• echo — Print text (or use echo text > file to write to file)
• touch — Create file
• cat — Read and display file contents
• ls — List directory
• pwd — Show current directory
• cd — Change directory
• mkdir — Create directory
• del — Delete file or directory

Build

./build.sh

This generates buildartifacts/kernel.bin and iso/Karion-OS.iso for emulation.