3 ms·
I suppose it depends what you want to get out of it. There's certainly educational value in going as deep as you have the stomach for. But, for me at least, lea
by a-priori 16y ago
I suppose it depends what you want to get out of it. There's certainly educational value in going as deep as you have the stomach for. But, for me at least, learning the specifics of how to get a processor on the PC architecture into a usable state gets tedious fast.
- m_eiman 16y agoIf I were to write a basic OS, I'd do it for one of the microcontroller kits that are available, e.g. http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ or something similar with an ARM7 cpu. Having a cleaner CPU architecture than x86 is bound to save a lot of headache...
- jacquesm 16y agoThe biggest challenge I found was not to adapt to CPU architecture headaches but to get to the point where the OS was self hosting its development. That took considerably longer than I ever bargained for and at the time virtual machines were pretty much non-existent so djgpp was used to bridge the gap. An edit-compile-test cycle of several minutes + a hang or so quickly eats up the days.
- m_eiman 16y agoAn edit-compile-test cycle of several minutes + a hang or so quickly eats up the days. That's why the micros are an interesting option, they're running on real hardware but can be flashed in seconds and debugged in realtime with a JTAG cable. Very convenient. But on the other hand they tend not to have much storage or network connectivity, so it depends on what you're interested in if they're the right choice. Blinking LEDs and controlling step motors is always fun, though!
- leoc 16y agohttp://pandaboard.org/ http://pandaboard.org/ and http://beagleboard.org/ http://beagleboard.org/ to the rescue I think, though there's no free software that supports Pandaboard (OMAP 4430/Cortex-A9) JTAG yet.