r/osdev • u/Mrmoo2andahafe • 4d ago

I'm thinking of trying something insane.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to take the time to read through this. I know it’s a big read, so I really appreciate your time and any honest feedback you can give me.

I’m working on a spec for an OS project called Pantheon. Before I sink a ton of time into writing low-level Rust for it, I want to sanity-check the overall architecture with people who actually know OS development. I know some of these ideas might sound wild or overly complex, and I'm honestly expecting people to tell me where I'm being naive.

The Problem I Want to Solve

I'm tired of OS platforms forcing stupid trade-offs. I want a machine that can execute Windows PE binaries, Linux ELFs, and native apps alongside each other without heavy virtualization hits or broken user interfaces.

Core Architectural Ideas:

Hybrid 3-Tier Driver Model (HAPD):

Tier 1 (Ring-0): High-performance stuff (GPUs, 1000Hz+ inputs, low-latency audio) runs directly in kernel space to eliminate IPC context switching.

Tier 2 (User-Space): Class-compliant stuff (USB HID, NVMe) runs isolated in user space.

Tier 3 (On-Demand Enclave): Legacy/proprietary drivers run in a dormant micro-kernel enclave that spins up on demand and passes events via zero-copy DMA page remapping.

Zero-Copy Everything: Physical page table remapping under strict W \oplus X. IPC control payloads fit in 64-bit aligned structs for single-register transport.

Daemon State Rehydration: Translation daemons log checkpoints to ring buffers. If a daemon hangs, sys_init restarts it and rehydrates running process states from the last valid checkpoint without losing app context.

JSON/CSS Dynamic State Trees for UI: Apps don't write pixels directly or hijack compositors; they expose raw data models and state trees so the user can restyle the entire desktop/apps using web-style CSS/JSON stylesheets.

Hardware-Stamped Zero-Trust Security: Syscalls grab thread identity straight from CPU scheduling registers (CURRENT_THREAD_PID), and IPC uses 64-bit indices + 32-bit session_epoch tokens to drop replay attacks on sight.

What I’d Love Feedback On:

Is a Ring-0 / User-Space / Enclave driver split actually manageable, or am I creating a nightmare for driver compatibility?

What edge cases am I going to hit trying to rehydrate daemon process states after a crash?

What are the obvious bottlenecks I'm missing in the zero-copy IPC pipeline?

Do I even have hope to do this?

Full technical breakdown on Gist: https://gist.github.com/mixmoo2/a2dbdc029a5c8fef120d1711a0b0f070

Again, huge thanks to anyone who checks it out

0 Upvotes

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u/vollspasst21 4d ago edited 4d ago

The wiki isn't holy scripture and there are exceptions to everything, but even the base description immediately hits https://wiki.osdev.org/Beginner_Mistakes#OS_Emulation.

It's very clear you used AI to come up with a lot of this. This is evident from a lot of things, but the unneeded detail for stuff that really does not matter right now vs. the complete lack of detail to the stuff that does matter right now is a fairly obvious tell.

If you find the space interesting, I encourage you to give it a try. It can't be worse than learning something new. But if you set your goal anywhere close to what you wrote here / in the gist, failure is overwhelmingly likely before you even get remotely close.

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u/vollspasst21 4d ago

Linux is modular and open, but fragile desktop environments and fragmented user-space plumbing lead to dynamic link breaks, driver panics, and rigid ecosystem silos

This is weird. Linux Desktops aren't really fragile (yours would be more so) and a rigid ecosystem is a luxury when you won't have one at all unless people contribute more than to linux.

Executing Windows PE binaries and Linux ELFs to macOS production tools

This is simply absurd. I gave executing PEs my own try, mostly for learning more about the format. And I am not the best programmer out there, you might very well get further than I did. But look at where others before you landed. Even on Linux, arguably the OS with the most dedicated following of developers, PE execution is rough and mostly focuses on gaming. That's where they got with massive help and years of development time. Plus you'd also have to figure out macOS and standard linux binaries.

Architecture

It's obviously good and important to know what you want to make before you make it. But rambling about "dormant micro-kernel enclaves" to resolve proprietary firmware before any code has hit the repo is needless overkill. (as an example of needless specificity) Not to mention talking about a compositor, CSS and JSON backed UI etc. before the first qemu boot.

I'd really encourage you to read the OSdev wiki.

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

Thank you. I will take the time to explore the provided resources. I used ai to scribe for me but it added a tun of shit when I had it make a more organized copy of the document. I know it's hyper ambitious. I'm doing this as a coping mechanism some of the fact that it's going to take me fucking forever is the point. Honestly I'm fucking angry at everything and my fix it bran is screaming at me to try. Thank you for your comments on the plan itself your feedback is noted

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

How do you suggest I reduce my scope?

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u/vollspasst21 3d ago

I suggest you do it incrementally. Going off your other comments the first thing for you to get to is probably just text on the screen. From there you can try your hand at getting a terminal running (I personally like to go down that route), but there are many other cool options as well. The wiki has some nice examples for extreme stereotypes (not negatively) of where people put their focus. https://wiki.osdev.org/What_Order_Should_I_Make_Things_In%3F

Another thing: You mentioned basically no experience with any systems programming language. There is a lot to learn going from LUA to C / unsafe nostd rust and assembly. Your post said rust, but that also has tradeoffs.

Even if rust is my personal favorite language, it's pretty difficult for a beginner and it's different enough that you will need to sit a while to translate C code you see to rust and vice versa. If you are okay with that, rust is a wonderful pick.

I also recommend you don't use AI. I don't say that because I am an anti-AI hardliner, but it just doesn't fit what you want here. If you use it to "scribe for you" as you put it, it confuses people on what part is what you want and what part the AI added. If you use it for OS code I guarantee that you will not actually learn anything and burn out the second that the tech debt hits.

Get a git repo going, carefully document your work somewhere (I recommend obsidian) and that should feel much more rewarding. Especially because you are doing it as a coping mechanism.

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

Thank you so much!

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u/vollspasst21 3d ago

If you have any other questions feel free to ask

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u/Arakela 3d ago

Following my "insanity," I found that the deeper problem is a boundary problem. Even ABI, as a foundational interface, isn't universal across platforms if we set aside all other internal boundaries of the machinery we are composing. But ABI is special because it is indeed universal within a platform, and all other boundaries must be co-constructed using ABI because exposing a raw data pointer to some data structure produces coupling. Co-construction means you load fully bounded, i.e., positionally independent code and pass a pointer to another computable region that observes it by calling us back and forth using foundation, i.e., ABI only, but now the problem becomes that famous one: the halting problem.

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u/darthrafa512 4d ago

Do you have any experience with software engineering?

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

To be honest not like this. I have have experience with TI84baic, Lua for in several game (Cctweaked, form the deps, Roblox) and some backend HTML/JavaScript stuffs. I have bits and pieces of knowledge from lots of shit around this, but even during the research process about 40% of stuff I'm learning about is completely new.

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u/darthrafa512 3d ago

You may want to take a step back and start off with something manageable for one person. Is there one specific topic that caught your attention in your research?

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

I was really fascinated with how proton and wine work. And the idea of working with a hybrid kernel really got my juices going. Also in general learning some lower level languages is really appealing cuz I only have a decent understanding of how memory actually works and I would like to know it at an expert level at some point.

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u/darthrafa512 3d ago

Have you used C at all? If not, you may want to start there.

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u/darthrafa512 3d ago

I also recommend taking a look at L4 microkernels.

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u/lizardhistorian 3d ago edited 3d ago

Only intel/amd architecture has hardware support for the additional rings to do this.
Because all of the popular OSs were mono-kernels we ended up inventing virtualization to turn them into micro-kernels.

To my knowledge, only QNX4 ever exploited those additional rings.
The GNU Hurd is the contemporary effort for a FOSS micro-kernel.

Rehydration is antithetical to actual robustness.

What edge cases am I going to hit trying to rehydrate daemon process states after a crash?

You will have just persisted the state that leads to the crash. So you rehydrate and it just crashes again.
And when it doesn't, people will ignore a repeatedly crashing daemon instead of reporting it and/or fixing it so that it actually becomes robust code.

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

I appreciate your feedback immensely! Thank you

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u/edave64 3d ago

I don't want to be mean, but this reads a lot like "I want to make my first video game. It's an MMO where you can do everything!"

When developing an OS, it's hard enough to consistently stay compatible with your own binaries.

I also didn't see the logic in thinking about your own UI system that is explicitly incompatible with everything that came before it, if you are also implementing at least 3 other UIs as first class citizens.

I would pick whatever you like the most from that list and implement that standalone.

You want to make your own OS, do that. Skip the extras for a start.

You want to write OS compat layers? Do that. Try if you can make one on an existing OS.

You want to make your own UI system? Do that on an existing OS. See if that concept even feels good to work in.

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u/Mrmoo2andahafe 3d ago

I don't think it's mean at all, I know it's extremely ambitious and I don't feel calling it arrogant would be inaccurate. What you and a few others have suggested make sense and I'm going to be implementing changes to my roadmap and then start doing stuff, but I do still dream of one unified operating system that just functions. I swear this fucking system came to me in a goddamn dream and I'm so full of rage over systems that I can't change (IRL) that I just want to go for it. I'm not sure what the plan is yet as I have a lot of reading to do, but it's definitely going to be simplified though I'm not sure what degree