README.md

Documentation

Welcome to the documentation of NightOS. This directory contains all design and specification documents of the project.

The rendered documentation can be found on https://clementnerma.github.io/NightOS.

A global, technical overview of the system's architecture can be found here.

Foreword

Project

• Roadmap - the project's roadmap
• Development - how the project will be developped
• Hardware requirements - hardware required in order to install and run NightOS

Concepts

• Applications - the way to run software on NightOS
• Libraries - sharing identical behaviours between multiple applications
• Users - sharing a computer between multiple persons

Features

• The balancer - improve performances by balancing processes' priority
• Crash saves - prevent data loss at maximum with crash-proof data saving
• Domains - manage a network of computers
• Encryption - encrypt the whole storage and individual user accounts
• Freeze-prevention system - prevent the system from freezing when all RAM and CPU power are used
• Parental control - manage children access to the computer
• Permissions system - prevent applications and users from doing whatever they want
• Sandboxes - isolate applications to prevent them from harming important data
• Synchronization - synchronize settings between multiple computers

Applications

The list of default applications and their description can be found here.

Technical

• Overview - a global overview of the system
• The controller - permissions management system
• Developer mode - enable powerful development options
• Devices - manage hardware devices
• File formats - description of all native file formats
• I/O manager - manage input/output requests
• Multi-platform management - how the NightOS ecosystem can be used on other operating systems
• Performances - system tweaks used to optimize general and specific-case performances
• Pre-compiling applications - pre-compiling applications to improve installation time and size
• Processes - low-level view of how code runs in a concurrent way
• The registry - configure the system's behaviour and features
• Services - special processes that run in the background and allow other applications to perform specific tasks
• The shell - the de-facto way to run complex and/or automatized tasks on NightOS

Specifications

• Applications and libraries - document describing common things between applications and libraries
• Applications - how applications are structured and behave
• Libraries - what are libraries
• Filesystem - how the filesystem works
• Storage permissions - how permissions are managed on filesystem elements
• The boot process - how updates are performed
• Update processes - how updates are performed
• Containers - process isolation system
• Permissions - list of applications' permissions
• The registry - exhaustive specification of the registry's content
• Vocabulary - the list of NightOS-related terms
• The shell - the native shell of NightOS
• Shell scripting - Hydre's scripting language
• Crash saves - what are crash saves and how they are handled
• Services - specifications about services work and behave
• Translations - how content translation is handled

Kernel

• Hardware - how the kernel interacts with hardware
• Memory - memory organization and management
• Processes - processes concept and management
• Scheduling - tasks scheduling
• Data structures - data structures used by the kernel to represent things in memory
• Kernel-process communication - how the kernel communicate with processes and vice-versa
• Inter-process communication - communication between processes
• Signals - complete specification of signals
• System calls - complete specification of system calls

Integration services

• Desktop environments - how the user interface is handled by applications
• File managers - how file managers are integrated into the system
• File openers - how files are associated to applications
• Filesystem interfaces - how filesystems are handled by third-party services

Driver services

• Storage driver service

System services

• sys::fs - the filesystem service
• sys::fsh - the high-level filesystem service
• sys::hw - the hardware service
• sys::perm - the permissions service
• sys::net - the network service
• sys::crypto - the cryptography service
• sys::crashsave - the crash saves service
• sys::hydre - the shell (Hydre) service
• sys::app - the applications management service
• sys::process - the processes management service

User Experience

• Desktop environments
• Notifications
• Sound