> I started out by creating a dll file with all the system calls implemented. Later I learned how a kernel actually works. So I rewrote it, emulating an interrupt to run in a separate kernel space. Could you name some of the details you want described?
"to run in a separate kernel space" You emulated those interrupts, and they really run in a separate kernel space [1]? Or you mean it's emulated as if it runs in a separate kernel space?
If it's really running in kernel mode, as you are literally saying, how is it doing that? Is it running in some virtual machine manager like Hyper-V or as something like a driver in the Windows kernel? How does it interact with the hardware e.g. does it access the same file systems that Windows does, and how does it coordinate that?
Looking at the source code I don't see any references to the Windows WDK / DDK (driver development kit) but a lot of references to user-space Windows API functions. I also don't see most of the actual BSD kernel [2]. For example, could you point me at the process/thread scheduling code (like sched_bsd.c [3])? Are you sure it's a kernel? Are you sure it runs kernel space, not user space after all? It seems like it might actually be an abstraction layer that emulates the user-space BSD system calls but runs in user-mode and make use of (only) the Windows kernel. If so, what do you mean by "emulating an interrupt" - how are you intercepting them? If you're just providing the C API functions to link into the application, and that don't actually trigger those interrupts at all, that is something a lot less ambitious. Still something impressive and worthwhile but you're setting readers up for disappointment if you describe it as something that it isn't.
That is what Cygwin does by the way. It implements POSIX APIs in user space. It does not claim to be a kernel (because it's not) or to run in kernel mode (because it doesn't). The thing is, I can understand you may have chosen the name "MinC is not Cygwin" because it works in roughly the same sort of way as Cygwin but is a different implementation. But the name, along with the description as being "a tiny kernel", suggests that it's not Cygwin because it works in a fundamentally different way, i.e., running the actual BSD kernel in actual kernel mode.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_space_and_kernel_space
[2] Mirror is available at: https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/sys/kern
[3] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/kern/sched_bs...
"to run in a separate kernel space" You emulated those interrupts, and they really run in a separate kernel space [1]? Or you mean it's emulated as if it runs in a separate kernel space?
If it's really running in kernel mode, as you are literally saying, how is it doing that? Is it running in some virtual machine manager like Hyper-V or as something like a driver in the Windows kernel? How does it interact with the hardware e.g. does it access the same file systems that Windows does, and how does it coordinate that?
Looking at the source code I don't see any references to the Windows WDK / DDK (driver development kit) but a lot of references to user-space Windows API functions. I also don't see most of the actual BSD kernel [2]. For example, could you point me at the process/thread scheduling code (like sched_bsd.c [3])? Are you sure it's a kernel? Are you sure it runs kernel space, not user space after all? It seems like it might actually be an abstraction layer that emulates the user-space BSD system calls but runs in user-mode and make use of (only) the Windows kernel. If so, what do you mean by "emulating an interrupt" - how are you intercepting them? If you're just providing the C API functions to link into the application, and that don't actually trigger those interrupts at all, that is something a lot less ambitious. Still something impressive and worthwhile but you're setting readers up for disappointment if you describe it as something that it isn't.
That is what Cygwin does by the way. It implements POSIX APIs in user space. It does not claim to be a kernel (because it's not) or to run in kernel mode (because it doesn't). The thing is, I can understand you may have chosen the name "MinC is not Cygwin" because it works in roughly the same sort of way as Cygwin but is a different implementation. But the name, along with the description as being "a tiny kernel", suggests that it's not Cygwin because it works in a fundamentally different way, i.e., running the actual BSD kernel in actual kernel mode.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_space_and_kernel_space
[2] Mirror is available at: https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/sys/kern
[3] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/kern/sched_bs...