basicios

basicios is a small, educational operating system project designed to illustrate core OS concepts such as bootstrapping, process management, scheduling, and basic I/O. It is intended for teaching and experimentation rather than production use.

Architecture: The kernel is compact, written mainly in C with assembly stubs for hardware initialization. It targets x86 hardware with a simple boot loader that loads the kernel from disk or a simulator. The memory model is flat and non-paged, with a basic physical allocator. The scheduler implements a round-robin policy for a small set of processes. I/O is provided by a console driver with keyboard and screen support, and a minimal disk driver plus a tiny file system enable basic file-like operations.

Development and availability: Basicios projects are typically hosted in educational repositories and released under permissive licenses. Build tooling commonly involves a cross-compiler toolchain (GCC, an assembler) and a small Makefile, with emulators such as QEMU or Bochs for testing.

Usage and reception: In classrooms and self-study, basicios helps learners explore boot sequences, kernel initialization, context switching, and simple I/O. It lacks modern features such as virtual memory, protection, or a full filesystem, reflecting its role as a learning platform rather than a practical operating system.