[ros-dev] Announcing Neptune OS release v0.1.1: A Windows NT personality for the seL4 microkernel

[Chang Liu]

Hi list,

This is not strictly ReactOS development per se but I used a large amount
of ReactOS code and it's at least spiritually related to ReactOS, so I'm
cross-posting this here to see if I get more comments. Below is the
original message I posted on the seL4 mailing list:

For the past several months I have been working on a project which is to
implement a Windows NT personality for the seL4 microkernel, which I have
now taken to call “Neptune OS”, named after the codename for Windows 2000.
The project has reached the point where I have implemented enough NT
primitives such that a keyboard driver stack (taken from the ReactOS source
code) can be loaded (as a user process on seL4), as well as a command
prompt (shell), which is also taken from the ReactOS source code (albeit a
very early version of ReactOS). These are all kernel-mode Windows device
drivers that I’m running as user processes under seL4. The goal is to
demonstrate that with modern progress in microkernel design it is indeed
possible to realize the original NT design as an object-oriented,
message-passing based client-server model microkernel OS (allegedly NT was
originally going to be a microkernel, as seen in the NTOSKRNL code that has
a ke layer and an ex layer).

The project is now on github: github.com/cl91/NeptuneOS. The entire system
fits in a floppy (download link:
github.com/cl91/NeptuneOS/releases/tag/v0.1.0001).

Check it out! I think it’s cool! For the next release I’m planning to port
the PCI stack, the AHCI stack, and a basic file system (probably
fastfat.sys).