tlenix

Custom x86_64 OS built upon the Linux kernel. Boots from a USB.

Components

init: Responsible for booting up the system. Starts up mash.

mash: Max's Shell. An extremely primitive command-line-interface shell.

Setup - USB UEFI Boot

0. Watch out!

Messing with stuff like the bootloader can screw up your system if you don't know what you're doing! If you aren't confident, I recommend using a virtual Linux machine as the host when setting up the USB.

This project is in its early stages and is not thoroughly tested... Follow these instructions at your own risk.

1. Partition the USB

Make 2 partitions:

1. EFI System partition (~512 MiB if you're not sure) formatted as FAT-32
2. Dedicate the rest to a Linux root (x86-64) partition formatted as anything that works with Linux (I use ext4).

2. Set up the USB for booting

In these examples, I'm using /dev/sda1 as the name of the EFI System partition and /dev/sda2 as the name of the Linux root partition- your device names will likely be different!

Make sure you have the right drive/partition names. I don't want you messing up your files!

Mount the root partition: mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Make a place for the EFI partition to live: mkdir -pv /mnt/boot/efi

Mount the EFI partition: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

3. Install GRUB on the drive

Make sure you get these arguments right- you don't want to overwrite your own GRUB config!

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/mnt/boot/efi --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda

4. Copy the Kernel and Initramfs

The easiest thing to do is to simply use your current kernel and initramfs, but you can absolutely make your own if you prefer.

These examples assume your kernel image is named vmlinuz-linux and your initramfs is named initramfs-linux.img- adjust your file names accordingly.

cp /boot/{vmlinuz-linux,initramfs-linux.img} /mnt/boot

5. Configure GRUB

Create a new GRUB configuration at /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg. Here's an example:

set default=0
set timeout=30

menuentry "tlenix" {
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda2 rw
    initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
}

6. Create basic directory structures

The kernel needs these directories to do stuff:

mkdir -pv /mnt/{bin,sbin,etc,lib,lib64,var,dev,proc,sys,run,tmp}

Make some nodes that the kernel also needs:

/dev/console character device: mknod -m 600 /mnt/dev/console c 5 1

/dev/null character device: mknod -m 666 /mnt/dev/null c 1 3

7. Install tlenix

Grab the binaries from the Releases page.

Pay attention to where you're installing each binary!

Install init: sudo cp init /mnt/sbin/init

Install mash: sudo cp mash /mnt/bin/mash

Make sure the init file path matches the root= argument in your grub.cfg from step 5!

8. Reboot and run!

If you don't boot into GRUB with tlenix as an option, make sure that your USB stick is at the top of boot priority in your computer's BIOS settings.