3 ms·
> Interesting, but very Intel-centric, the name of the site should probably reflect that. Anyone doing this stuff for fun would probably have a lot more fun on
by exDM69 14y ago
> Interesting, but very Intel-centric, the name of the site should probably reflect that. Anyone doing this stuff for fun would probably have a lot more fun on a 68k or MIPS or ARM.
OSdev is very x86 centric. However, x86_64 is not as bad as you seem to imply. The instruction set is horrible but it's not like you're going to mess with assembly a lot anyway. Memory management units and interrupt controllers, etc are the important bits and they're just fine in x86.
I get a great satisfaction of being able to boot into my toy operating system on the hardware I normally use. And that is an x86. Running inside an emulator or a dev board with dangling wires is not half as fun.
- throwaway_95014 14y agoDealing with both timekeeping and interrupts on x86 systems is awful. Anyone that thinks that the x86 interrupt architecture is "just fine" has rocks in their head.
- exDM69 14y agoYeah, it has it's hairy parts but it still doesn't deserve all the bashing it gets. I found the LAPIC and IOAPIC controllers okay to deal with, I guess there are better ones but multi-core interrupt handling is a complex matter so you can't expect the hardware to be very simple either. Some of the legacy parts are quite hairy, but you can work your way around them quite quickly.