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MVH Kernel is an independent, bare-metal ELF64 kernel for x86_64, developed by MVH Cloud. It provides physical and virtual memory management, a virtual filesystem, a hardware abstraction layer, interrupt handling, and an interactive shell — everything you need as a foundation for custom OS development. You integrate MVH Kernel directly with your own bootloader and run it on real hardware or a compatible emulator.

Introduction

Learn what MVH Kernel is, what it provides, its current limitations, and how to understand its architecture before you begin integrating.

Quickstart

Build and boot MVH Kernel from source in three steps. Get to an interactive shell prompt as fast as possible.

Memory API

Reference documentation for the physical memory manager — allocating and freeing 4 KiB pages, reading allocation statistics, and understanding page protections.

Shell Overview

Browse the full list of built-in shell commands, their syntax, and what each one reports about the running kernel.

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How to get started

Follow these four steps to go from source code to a running kernel with an interactive shell.
1

Build the kernel

Clone the repository and run make. The build system compiles all kernel modules with GCC and links them into a single build/kernel.elf ELF64 binary.
2

Integrate your bootloader

Configure your bootloader to identity-map the first GiB of physical memory, pass the available memory size in KiB via the boot-memory-size-kib convention, and jump to the _kernel64_start entry point in x86_64 Long Mode.
3

Boot the kernel

Load build/kernel.elf using your bootloader. The kernel initialises the HAL, memory manager, VFS, interrupt layer, PCI bus, and all built-in drivers before dropping into the interactive shell.
4

Use the shell

Interact with the running kernel at the mvh> prompt. Run help for a full command list, meminfo for memory statistics, uname for version information, and ls to browse the volatile RAM filesystem.