Vex

Vex is a hobby operating system kernel written in C (gnu2x) and built with Meson. Limine boots it over UEFI. amd64 is the only implemented architecture: the Meson build knows the riscv64 and aarch64 names, but there is no kernel/arch/ code for them yet.

This book is the architecture guide. It explains how the kernel is put together and why each part is done the way it is. It is not an API reference: the declarations in kernel/include/ carry their own /// documentation, and clangd shows it on hover.

Where to start

• Build the kernel and the test image.
• Run it in QEMU.
• Source map to find where something lives.
• Overview for the whole picture.

How this book is organised

• Getting started covers the build, the test image and the source tree.
• Architecture describes the kernel-wide mechanisms: boot, memory, processes, system calls, the VFS, the device model.
• Drivers, Filesystems and Buses hold one page per implementation. A page exists when the implementation makes a decision worth explaining.
• Reference holds tables: syscalls, the ABI, capabilities, device names.
• Development covers testing and how to update this book.

Status

The getting-started pages are complete. Most architecture pages are still stubs. Until they are complete, docs/kernel/architecture.md describes the kernel-wide mechanisms, and CONTRIBUTING.md holds the full style rules.