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I've followed Phil's site on making an operating system. Ever since having worked on PintOS in college, operating systems and their internals have fascinated me

I've followed Phil's site on making an operating system. Ever since having worked on PintOS in college, operating systems and their internals have fascinated me. I've tried learning more about writing operating systems via resources like the OSdev wiki, but much of its material almost seems to discourage working on an OS of any kind unless you're already sure of what you're doing. Phil's articles seems so much more accessible for someone just wanting to dip their toes in the water.

fermienrico 8y ago
I agree. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a "Handmade Hero" series but for OS development in Rust? That would be incredible. A lot of the OS development, especially esoteric subjects are behind walls of IP control barring Linux kernel. Even then, just reading the source code is different than having access to the knowledge base that enables you to write such a code. I am new to all of this but like you, I am fascinated.
- jb3689 8y ago
  Just found "Handmade Hero" last weekend and now this. Programmer's dream
  - faitswulff 8y ago
    How does one approach watching Handmade Hero? There's just so much content...
    - fermienrico 8y ago
      Think it is a problem but every other resource in game development is summarized, organized and bookish. Handmade Hero is unique in that it is: - Real time, watching a dude program a game - He speaks his though process, stumbles, gets up and resolves issues - Community interaction as they progress through the game All, at the expense of content bloat. I think its popularity has spoken for itself in that Handmade Hero is a totally unique form of education.
      - johnc1231 8y ago
        Is there any video somewhere of the actual game the handmade hero series builds up to? I would want to know the goal before jumping in
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        The game is still actively in development. It isn't just a clone of some other game, it's a new game and the actual design of the game is another part of the project that's evolving as the engine is built.
        smrq 8y ago
        To be honest, I think this is the primary weakness of Handmade Hero. Casey is plainly a more talented programmer than designer, and his missteps in the latter domain felt to me more like wasted time than valuable experience. This is why I stopped watching somewhere between episode 200 and 300.
        db48x 8y ago
        Backtracking, experimenting, and changing your mind is part of the game development process. No game ever ends up being exactly what the designers imagined at the start.
- tormeh 8y ago
  >A lot of the OS development, especially esoteric subjects are behind walls of IP control barring Linux kernel. Join the Redox community! Development is on gitlab[0] and chat is on Mattermost. 0: https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/ https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/
  - rixrax 8y ago
    +1! Redox Os (micro kernel Os written in Rust) feels like a gust of fresh air! Godspeed! I am rooting for you! I don’t know what this says about me but I haven’t been this excited about new OS since I first installed OpenBSD 2.5. :)
simias 8y ago
I think it's one of these things that's more approachable if you start by working on specific subsystems of an existing OS. This way you don't have to figure everything out at once. At least that's how I did it. I think writing an OS from scratch is discouraging and not very accessible because... writing an OS is discouraging and not very accessible. It's a bit as if a painter was saying "It tried looking up guides on how to paint The Wedding Feast at Cana but they all make it look super difficult, I wish I could get an easy step-by-step tutorial". Even if you break it down in small, digestible parts I'd wager that you'll end up with a few hundred episodes before you even get a basic microkernel up and running on a modern system. It's truly a daunting task. I learned that the hard way: I tried to write a guide on how to emulate a PlayStation from scratch. At first you focus on emulating the instructions in the CPU, that's relatively focused and straightforward. But then once you're done with that you need to explain the various peripherals, and the main bus, and the interrupts, and the cache, and the timers, and the pipelines, and the intricacies of the various CD formats, and the memorycard filesystem, and video modes, and paging, and high impedance, and metastability and everything kind of interacts with everything else so it's difficult to maintain a coherent narrative. On top of that a PlayStation is a ridiculously simple system compared to a modern desktop computer. The task of writing a very accessible guide on how to write an OS that would take you from zero to a working userland is absolutely tremendous. I think you could probably write a thousand-page book on the virtual memory subsystem alone.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  For what it's worth, this is exactly how most Operating Systems courses in undergraduate CS work, so it definitely seems like many different smart people have converged on this as the right way to go. At least in my course, we did build a toy OS by the end of the semester, but it was rigorously divided projects for the individual subsystems in isolation: write the pre-emptive scheduler, write the networking layer, write the filesystem, etc. A modern OS is an incredibly complex beast and trying to grasp it all at once is just going to lead to madness.
- JesseWright 8y ago
  I fully agree, but I think it's good to have options on how to approach the issue. Generally, I've referred to OSDev when I need more real-world information on how things tend to work in practice and resources like Phil's when writing a toy operating system. I wouldn't consider Phil's blog a good resource for, e.g., gaining particular insight into how something like the Linux kernel works, but I also don't think Phil intended it for that use.
vectorEQ 8y ago
definitely not an easy journey :D to learn to write x64 OS. After getting paging and interrupts it plunged me into the depths of compilers / assemblers / file formats and linking & loading all to be tackled at the same time :'D would use ELF to prevent 2 of the topics, but where's the fun in that :D like these articles too as they are fairly complete where a lot of other tutorials omit a long of things or are just some scattered collection of information which is hard to put into a project.
renholder 8y ago
Same here. Especially MenuetOS[1], because it was written in Assembly and originally fit on a floppy disk. That's a level of patience and programming (in Assembly) that I can only admire from afar... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS
- gshack 8y ago
  Holy heck, it's still in active development

fermienrico 8y ago

I agree. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a "Handmade Hero" series but for OS development in Rust? That would be incredible. A lot of the OS development, especially esoteric subjects are behind walls of IP control barring Linux kernel. Even then, just reading the source code is different than having access to the knowledge base that enables you to write such a code. I am new to all of this but like you, I am fascinated.

jb3689 8y ago
Just found "Handmade Hero" last weekend and now this. Programmer's dream
- faitswulff 8y ago
  How does one approach watching Handmade Hero? There's just so much content...
  - fermienrico 8y ago
    Think it is a problem but every other resource in game development is summarized, organized and bookish. Handmade Hero is unique in that it is: - Real time, watching a dude program a game - He speaks his though process, stumbles, gets up and resolves issues - Community interaction as they progress through the game All, at the expense of content bloat. I think its popularity has spoken for itself in that Handmade Hero is a totally unique form of education.
    - johnc1231 8y ago
      Is there any video somewhere of the actual game the handmade hero series builds up to? I would want to know the goal before jumping in
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        The game is still actively in development. It isn't just a clone of some other game, it's a new game and the actual design of the game is another part of the project that's evolving as the engine is built.
        smrq 8y ago
        To be honest, I think this is the primary weakness of Handmade Hero. Casey is plainly a more talented programmer than designer, and his missteps in the latter domain felt to me more like wasted time than valuable experience. This is why I stopped watching somewhere between episode 200 and 300.
        db48x 8y ago
        Backtracking, experimenting, and changing your mind is part of the game development process. No game ever ends up being exactly what the designers imagined at the start.
tormeh 8y ago
>A lot of the OS development, especially esoteric subjects are behind walls of IP control barring Linux kernel. Join the Redox community! Development is on gitlab[0] and chat is on Mattermost. 0: https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/ https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/
- rixrax 8y ago
  +1! Redox Os (micro kernel Os written in Rust) feels like a gust of fresh air! Godspeed! I am rooting for you! I don’t know what this says about me but I haven’t been this excited about new OS since I first installed OpenBSD 2.5. :)

simias 8y ago

I think it's one of these things that's more approachable if you start by working on specific subsystems of an existing OS. This way you don't have to figure everything out at once. At least that's how I did it. I think writing an OS from scratch is discouraging and not very accessible because... writing an OS is discouraging and not very accessible. It's a bit as if a painter was saying "It tried looking up guides on how to paint The Wedding Feast at Cana but they all make it look super difficult, I wish I could get an easy step-by-step tutorial". Even if you break it down in small, digestible parts I'd wager that you'll end up with a few hundred episodes before you even get a basic microkernel up and running on a modern system. It's truly a daunting task. I learned that the hard way: I tried to write a guide on how to emulate a PlayStation from scratch. At first you focus on emulating the instructions in the CPU, that's relatively focused and straightforward. But then once you're done with that you need to explain the various peripherals, and the main bus, and the interrupts, and the cache, and the timers, and the pipelines, and the intricacies of the various CD formats, and the memorycard filesystem, and video modes, and paging, and high impedance, and metastability and everything kind of interacts with everything else so it's difficult to maintain a coherent narrative. On top of that a PlayStation is a ridiculously simple system compared to a modern desktop computer. The task of writing a very accessible guide on how to write an OS that would take you from zero to a working userland is absolutely tremendous. I think you could probably write a thousand-page book on the virtual memory subsystem alone.

Analemma_ 8y ago
For what it's worth, this is exactly how most Operating Systems courses in undergraduate CS work, so it definitely seems like many different smart people have converged on this as the right way to go. At least in my course, we did build a toy OS by the end of the semester, but it was rigorously divided projects for the individual subsystems in isolation: write the pre-emptive scheduler, write the networking layer, write the filesystem, etc. A modern OS is an incredibly complex beast and trying to grasp it all at once is just going to lead to madness.
JesseWright 8y ago
I fully agree, but I think it's good to have options on how to approach the issue. Generally, I've referred to OSDev when I need more real-world information on how things tend to work in practice and resources like Phil's when writing a toy operating system. I wouldn't consider Phil's blog a good resource for, e.g., gaining particular insight into how something like the Linux kernel works, but I also don't think Phil intended it for that use.

vectorEQ 8y ago

definitely not an easy journey :D to learn to write x64 OS. After getting paging and interrupts it plunged me into the depths of compilers / assemblers / file formats and linking & loading all to be tackled at the same time :'D would use ELF to prevent 2 of the topics, but where's the fun in that :D like these articles too as they are fairly complete where a lot of other tutorials omit a long of things or are just some scattered collection of information which is hard to put into a project.

renholder 8y ago

Same here. Especially MenuetOS[1], because it was written in Assembly and originally fit on a floppy disk. That's a level of patience and programming (in Assembly) that I can only admire from afar... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS

gshack 8y ago
Holy heck, it's still in active development