What is Ace? Ace is an operating system. It is free and open source. It is released under GNU General Public License (GPL). To view the GNU GPL click here or visit www.gnu.org. Ace OS is still under development and the development is more focusing on the Kernel concepts. Ace is developed from a scratch none of its module is copied from Linux or any other OS.

Usage: Ace OS is developed for academic and research purposes. You can use Ace OS to study Operating System and Kernel Papers, because it is small and may be simple. Or you can use Ace OS for any purpose by modifing the source code.

Development: Ace OS Kernel modules are developed by absorbing the interesting, easy, effective concepts used by other Operating Systems. Most of its concepts coming from Windows NT and some from Linux and other open source operating systems. Currently the development focus on the kernel. No application is developed until now (Except the Shell - which is technically a application). The kernel is developed using the freely available Assembly and C compilers - NASM, Mingw and DJGPP. The Architecture page contains the technical architecture of Ace OS.

Users: This website's targeted audiences are who want to explore the system's hardware, who want to learn about system internals. Finally, it is for who want to create a new operating system(s) for X86 machines. The purpose of this site is to encourage and help OS developers around the world by sharing ideas and codes.

Specifications & Links: Both of these sections contain lot of links to external websites from where the stuffs needed to develop Ace OS were downloaded. Beyond Operating System and Kernel links there are also links for system, graphics programming, audio and C programming. You can get hardware datasheets, standards and specifications from the Specifications page. The Links page has links that related to OS development and other system related issues. If you want to know the architecture of Ace OS go to Architecture section, it also contains documentation for Ace OS.

Latest Release :
Ace OS V2.0 is released on 1-Sep-2005 to the public domain. After two years a new release has finally made. The delay is due to lot of changes in the kernel itself. The main changes in this version is Boot loader, Object Manager, IPC, Scheduler, Virtual 86 mode, FAT write and some memory manger related changes. And the changes are expected to be more in the upcoming version because driver model for Ace OS is not yet finalized. You can now easily boot the Ace OS since now Ace is multiboot compatible. To boot Ace all you want is just a multiboot complaint boot loader such as GRUB. You can get GRUB from the following web site. You can get the latest source and binary files from the download page. Setup page contains the instruction to install/setup Ace on a virtual or real machine. Build instructions and tools required to build Ace OS from source can be found in this link.

This is the screen shot of beta version Ace OS 2.0. Want to see more screen shots? - click here Ace OS V 2.0 Overview: Stability - Almost all critical sections are checked for error prone code. Exception Handling - General Protection Fault handler has changed for V86 mode C Library - Standard C Library has included. POSIX support is under development. Shell - A minimal POSIX based shell has included V86 Mode - Virtual 86 mode is included mainly to call VESA functions. Driver - Drivers are not supported in this version since Driver Model has not yet fixed. Scheduler - Scheduler code has changed a lot to run faster. Executable Format - Only Portable Executable format is supported. SysCall - Call to OS handled by using Dispatch Table mechanism.

Development Kits : The following compilers, assemblers and tools are needed to compile Ace OS without any error. To see the full list of development tools used during the development of Ace OS visit the Development Kits page. That page has lot of useful tools that will be handy during C/C++ development.

• MinGW - Minimalist GCC for Windows (To compile C/C++ source files)
• NASM - Netwide assembler (To compile asm source files)


• Impdef.exe - To export PE symbols to a text file