Essence

A desktop operating system built from scratch, for control and simplicity.

Features:

Kernel

Filesystem independent cache manager. Memory manager with shared memory, memory-mapped files and multithreaded paging zeroing and working set balancing. Networking stack for TCP/IP. Scheduler with multiple priority levels and priority inversion. On-demand module loading. Virtual filesystem. Window manager. Audio mixer. (being rewritten) Optional POSIX subsystem, capable of running GCC and some Busybox tools.

Applications

File Manager Text Editor IRC Client System Monitor

Ports

Bochs GCC and Binutils FFmpeg Mesa (for software-rendered OpenGL) Musl

Drivers

Power management: ACPI with ACPICA. Secondary storage: IDE, AHCI and NVMe. Graphics: BGA and SVGA. Read-write filesystems: EssenceFS. Read-only filesystems: Ext2, FAT, NTFS, ISO9660. Audio: HD Audio. NICs: 8254x. USB: XHCI, bulk storage devices, human interface devices.

Desktop

Custom user interface library. Software vector renderer with complex animation support. Tabbed windows. Multi-lingual text rendering and layout with FreeType and Harfbuzz.