Building Aether

Host Prerequisites

• GNU Make — Used for orchestrating builds. Doesn’t have to be in PATH.
• QEMU — Required for running: qemu-system-x86_64 (x86_64) and/or qemu-system-aarch64 (aarch64).
• Python 3 — Required by code-generation scripts.
• Clang / LLVM — Used for compiling C/ASM code, for linking, and binutils.
• Rust — Used for compiling Rust code.

Architecture Configuration

All build and run commands accept an ARCH variable that selects the target architecture:

• ARCH=x86_64 — 64-bit x86
• ARCH=aarch64 — 64-bit ARM

Building

Build everything for x86_64:

make all ARCH=x86_64

Build everything for aarch64:

make all ARCH=aarch64

You can also build individual targets, for example:

# Build only the kernel ELF
make pkg/kernel/install ARCH=x86_64

# Build the init binary
make pkg/init/install ARCH=x86_64

# Build the hello_world binary
make pkg/hello_world/install ARCH=x86_64

# Build the bootable ISO image
make dist/aether-x86_64.iso ARCH=x86_64
# or
make dist/aether-aarch64.img ARCH=aarch64