ACE OS

 

What is Ace?
Ace is an operating system kernel for i386 architecture machines. It is free and open source. Ace OS is still under development. Ace is developed from scratch, none of its modules are flicked from any other OS! We have put lot of effort in designing this kernel from scratch and of course our fundamentals are based on concepts present in Unix, Windows....But the concepts implemented are purely a biproduct of our genuine research work. The recent version is Ace OS 3. Visit ACE 3 - Sourceforge for more information.
Development team: Samuel Jacob and myself (DilipSimha N M).

Usage: Ace OS is developed for academic and research purposes. You can use Ace OS to study Operating System and Kernel Papers, because it is small and may be simple. Or you can use Ace OS for any purpose by modifying the source code.

Users: This website's targeted audiences are who want to explore the system's hardware and who want to learn about system internals. Finally, it is also for who want to create a new operating system for X86 machines. The purpose of this article is to encourage and help OS developers around the world to share their code.
 

Development team:  Initially Samuel Jacob started Ace OS quite a long ago. He did all the hard work and put up a basic os which even had a shell. You can find more about that OS at: http://www.samueldotj.com/Ace/. That was Ace 1.0. He again pursued his interests and modified it to bring up ACE 2.0. Then I met this great geek at HP. I was very much inspired by his dedication and huge amount of knowledge he had amassed by then. I was lucky enough to join hands with him and start a new os from scratch. Sam is now an experienced OS designer and hence can now focus on building a stable os with latest concepts around the world. We started designing and coding from 2007 November and worked on weekends and late night after returning from office. I was very enthusiastic to learn new concepts from him. We put up lot of time in designing critical components like: Memory management, scheduler and process management. As and when we find time, we try to document what all we did, so that somebody might find it useful some day.

 

Progress in development: Ace OS Kernel modules are developed by absorbing the interesting, easy, effective concepts used by other Operating Systems. Most of its concepts come from Windows NT and Unix. Currently the development is fully focused on the kernel features. No application is developed until now. The kernel is developed using the freely available Assemblers and compilers.

You can download the source code from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aceos/

We have tried our best to document all the features that we have developed so far on ACE. You can click on any of the following to see what we have done so far:

Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC)

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)

Process Management

Virtual Memory Management

Booting process

Kernel memory

Kernel Parameters

Synchronization

Driver Model

Heap concepts