It has been about 2 months since the initial commit of the ZXFoundation kernel. Commit afad088 on April 27th. The journey on z/Architecture has been great, but is also a lot of work. Currently, the stage of the kernel is still very early; we are still working on the architecture, hardening subsystems and step-by-step adding features to the kernel. It can be considered, at this stage, a WIP project or a barebones kernel.

This initial milestone-even though a big milestone, does not mean that the kernel is ready to be used. And there is actually nothing to showcase yet. It primarily serves as a reference material for the upcoming releases. Currently, key features include:

• ZXFoundationLoader™ – a 2-stage bootloader
  • Mostly in C, ASM usage minimized
  • HHDM support
  • DASD/VTOC driver
  • Topologies support
  • Hardware-specific information
  • Somewhat portable if you want to use it
  • Custom protocol
• ZXVerifiedLoad™ - security protocol
  • Kernel binary lock
  • Handshake stub
  • SHA256 signature verification
• ZXFoundation™ – the kernel itself
  • SMP (and NUMA) support
  • 5 level paging (DAT)
  • EDAT-1/2 support
  • native 64 bit support (z/Architecture-exclusive)
  • basic hardware drivers like SCLP, STFLE, SIGP, …
  • zxallsyms for symbol lookup
  • libzxunwind for stack unwinding (backtrace)
  • libubsanrt for runtime sanitizers
  • koms as Kernel Object Managament System
  • simplelog/printk for logging

You can find the sources and changelog on GitHub.

Have fun!