Welcome to CopperOS

Welcome to the official CopperOS Project,

Let's talk about my OS

INTRODUCTION

CopperOS is a small BIOS-booting hobby OS with a freestanding C kernel, a two-stage NASM boot path, and a real (if minimal) network stack. Runs under qemu-system-x86_64 on Linux/macOS, and should also boot on real BIOS (or UEFI-with-CSM) x86 hardware — see "Real hardware" below for what degrades.

REAL HARDWARE

CopperOS is developed and tested against qemu-system-x86_64. It's written to be BIOS/real-hardware-plausible (manual VBE negotiation with a CHS fallback, A20, a flat GDT, polled ATA/PS2/serial), but a few things are genuinely virtualization-only:

The QEMU/Bochs "dispi" double-buffering extension isn't present on real VGA hardware — the renderer falls back to a direct blit (safe, but can tear on real hardware).

The network stack talks to a virtio-net-pci device; real bare-metal hardware generally doesn't expose one (some VMs/newer hardware might).

No UEFI support — BIOS/CSM boot only.

NOTES (Important you to read)

The current shipped build runs in 32-bit protected mode (no paging, no interrupts — a single polled main loop).

This version targets an 8-bit VESA framebuffer, cascading 1024×768 -> 800×600 -> 640×480 -> VGA 320×200.

The apps are kernel-rendered built-ins (compiled into one binary), not separate user-space programs.

Internet Explorer does real DNS + a real minimal TCP/HTTP client (see kernel/net/tcp.c/http.c); no HTTPS/TLS, redirects, or HTML rendering beyond stripping tags to plain text.

First boot launches a setup wizard for username, passcode, install/try mode, a real disk scan (ATA IDENTIFY across all 4 legacy IDE slots), theme, and network setup.

The Start menu includes Reboot to Bootloader, which opens a kernel-rendered bootloader screen.

Build a disk image with make; make iso/make vbox need hdiutil (macOS/Linux only if you have Make installed on your system).

Important note: CopperOS is developed to be intended to test, and learn how it works the x86_64 Operating system built FROM SCRATCH, If you use real hardware, use another computer (not your personal one) for your security.

Thanks for reading.

Use CopperOS at your own risk on real hardware. Any error or anything else visit: copperos.org/support