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LearnixOS
- Dreami 10mo agoFrom the name I thought this was about learning NixOS, and they found a very clever name Maybe the author could add a small note that this is not about that, and refer to something official about NixOS? Anyway, I like the idea of the project!
- hxugufjfjf 10mo agoThought the same! Was a bit interested in learning Nix for a moment.
- censorylls 10mo ago[flagged]
- anp 10mo ago> Others think someone from the Rust (programming language, not video game) development community was responsible due to how critical René has been of that project, but those claims are entirely unsubstantiated.
- layer8 10mo ago“*nix” means a Unix-like OS just generally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Anix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Anix), like for example in “Minix” and “Xenix”. Sticking “OS” to the end of an OS name is also commonplace. However, the title on the page is “The Learnix Operating System”, so the actual name seems to be just “Learnix”. It’s arguably Nix and NixOS who have unnecessarily stepped into the “*nix” namespace without adding a distinguishing prefix.
- otabdeveloper4 10mo ago> “*nix” means a Unix-like OS just generally "Unix-like OS" isn't a thing that has existed for two decades. Only Linux and Darwin survived, so don't do the "*nix" thing, please.
- onestay42 10mo agoBSD would like a word.
- wasting_time 10mo agoThey can't be heard over the faint booing from the Solaris crowd.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoFor that matter, if we're including the proprietary OSs, HP-UX is still kinda a thing and AIX is going strong. Of course, IIRC those are actual certified UNIX™ instead of unix-like... though I'd call that a subset, so still in scope IMO.
- riffraff 10mo agoTIL AIX is still in development and they had a release this month https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sanket-rathi1/2025/12/05/ibm-aix-73-tl4-features https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sanket-rathi1...
- otabdeveloper4 10mo agoWe don't talk about BSD here.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoIllumos is still actively developed, open source, and can trace its lineage back to actual unix. For that matter, we've had new members joining the family over the years; https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/ is, in their own words, "a complete Unix-like microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, with a focus on security, reliability and safety."
- nineteen999 10mo agoNot to mention that Version 4 UNIX source code was just released!
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoThen I guess the OS part is redundant, since thr nix already implies an OS.
- bheadmaster 10mo agoNo, actually Nix is a package manager/system configuration tool. NixOS uses Nix as part of its image.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoNo, nix clearly means a Unix-like OS and any other interpretation is wrong, as the context of this thread would suggest.
- bigyabai 10mo agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homonym https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homonym
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ZenoArrow 10mo agoSo your argument is the first usage of a word gets exclusive rights to it? Firstly, that's not how human languages work. Secondly, this would invalidate the Unix claim to "nix" as it's been a word for hundreds of years prior to Unix being invented.
- johannes1234321 10mo agoIt is, but in IT context the association was strong, while Unixes decline and most of the systems with derived naming are historic. But anybody with a background in sysadmin for more than 10 years probably would still have the association. In ten years Linux will probably the only one remaining with the ux-naming (and MacOS X with the single X, which also serves as ten, following MacOS 9)
- wasting_time 10mo agoI had the same confusion. Even without considering NixOS, "learnix" is awkward to pronounce and somewhat pretentious. I would suggest the name "Leanix" if the author is willing to rename. It rhymes with Minix which is the OG curriculum for a POSIX kernel, and is "lean" in many senses of the word. In any case an excellent writeup. It's detailed enough to implement in any programming language.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoI mean, it is about learning. It threw me for a loop too but I think it's actually reasonably appropriate.
- jaapz 10mo agoWhat's pretentious about learnix?
- layer8 10mo ago> I would suggest the name "Leanix" Then people would complain that it sounds too much like “Linux”.
- drob518 10mo agoParticularly if you have learned to pronounce Linus’s name correctly.
- JCattheATM 10mo agoI don't find it awkward to pronounce in the least, and not in any way pretentious. I think the name is fine as is.
- Sagi21805 10mo agoI like the current name and already have the domain :|
- amitav1 10mo agoI think that it's supposed to be a portmanteau of Unix and Learn.
- Sagi21805 10mo agoWill do!
- MontyCarloHall 10mo agoThis dedicates at least as much time to discussing the eccentricities of the underlying Rust implementation (and the Rust language itself) as it does to discussing the underlying low-level hardware/software concepts. Since this is very much still a work-in-progress (only the first three sections have been fully fleshed-out), I have a suggestion to make: please make it more language-agnostic, with a greater focus on the fundamentals versus the implementation.
- surajrmal 10mo agoOne of the hardest parts of writing an os is learning and understanding how to make the toolchain work the way you need it to. I wouldn't consider that a negative to spend time discussing it in such detail. Otherwise you have no idea how to even apply the high level concepts.
- bwfan123 10mo ago> greater focus on the fundamentals versus the implementation I am seeing this too. Folks are suddenly saying - lets implement this in Rust (or insert any other language here) without thinking about what this does to the fundamentals. A bandwagon effect which developers are swept by. And for managers it is a great way to show how innovative your team is. This applies not just to languages but entire development stacks almost like fashions in clothing.
- positron26 10mo agoThey might be focused on programmers, not users. Programmers come first because otherwise users don't come at all.
- drnick1 10mo agoC would have been a more natural/neutral choice to be honest for a project like this, since every OS actually used is written in C.
- JuniperMesos 10mo agoThis is a bad thing we should try to change
- incognito124 10mo agoLooking forward to going through the lessons
- herodotus 10mo agoThis is an ambitious project. Might I respectfully suggest that you use your favourite AI (or an English-speaking friend) to fix your many grammatical errors and typos? For example "Note: ALL the syntax highlighting of the Rust code is custom and create by me! If you see and bug, please write in the comments or submit an issue." should be "Note: ALL the syntax highlighting of the Rust code is custom and was created by me! If you see a bug, please leave a comment or submit an issue." Also, Rust, not rust. And many more.
- breaker-kind 10mo agoAnd* many more ;)
- herodotus 10mo agoThanks ....
- sdsd 10mo agoThat's a good suggestion to OP but as a user, I find it adds character and makes it feel human in an increasingly LLM-polished internet.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThat's how I used to feel about spelling and grammar checkers. I was wrong. Maybe you are, too.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- slekker 10mo agoBleh, I think a typo here and there is fine, you can grasp the meaning, and gives the writing style "character". Yes, it's dire but I'd take that over the soul-less LLM writing style.
- Sagi21805 10mo agoBecause I didn't really publish it, I didn't check all the grammar and type errors This is something I will improve when the initial release will come
- Santosh83 10mo agoWhy always POSIX compliant? If its going to be a learning exercise or a hobby OS or just an exploration, why not throw POSIX out the window and start from scratch for designing the API?
- speed_spread 10mo agoI hope this builds on phil-opp's previous work which is IMO stellar.
- quibono 10mo agoWhat's the status on that? Did the series ever get finished?
- speed_spread 10mo agoNo word on whether it's finished or will ever be but already looks complete enough to me? I mean, the subject is endless and there are so many ways to do things. But as primer, it's pretty good as it is.
- Sagi21805 10mo agoI plan to cover more, like disk drivers, file systems, processes, shell, user space, processes, until we can run a working program! Hopefully, also networking
- croemer 10mo agoI spotted at least 3 typos in the first minute. Typos are really easily detected and fixed with LLMs (one really good usage of them). But it's nice to have non-LLM written text. Still the many typos are annoying and distracting.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10mo agoI think it's really cool that they're using bare-metal Rust for this. It's a lot more accessible than C because the standard distribution (rustup) can work as a cross-compiler to a no-OS target out of the box. Deliberately avoiding dependencies makes me happy too, people really underestimate what you can do with Rust without relying on the whole dependency ecosystem, and this is better pedagogically because you can understand the whole system. I'm rather amused at how https://www.learnix-os.com/ch01-02-booting-our-binary.html https://www.learnix-os.com/ch01-02-booting-our-binary.html has you creating a 16-bit target that ostensibly uses 32-bit pointers in its data layout… presumably that doesn't actually work to compile normal code to (edit: …or does it?! What on earth does LLVM do with that then…) but I guess it works so long as it's just acting as a scaffold for inline assembly. It's cool they don't need to bring in a secondary toolchain for the 16-bit part of bootstrapping, even if I worry this might break in some future rustc/LLVM revision.
- remexre 10mo agoThis only covers what's in https://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones https://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones, but in Rust, right?
- ksec 10mo agoTitle should be LearnixOS : POSIX compliant OS implemented in Rust.
- beasthacker 10mo agoI wanted to share a quick piece of feedback from a potential reader's perspective: There are several small inconsistencies in the intro text (e.g., inconsistent capitalization of 'Rust' vs 'rust', grammar typos). In a domain like OS development where extreme precision is required, these small errors can subconsciously signal to readers that the technical details might also be imprecise. A quick polish of the documentation would go a long way in establishing authority and trust for the rest of the book.
- threethirtytwo 10mo agoI couldn’t care less. It always pisses me off when a reviewer of my PR just flags the entire thing because of inconsistent capitalization. It’s the right correction and I always follow through but it’s also pedantic. It’s technically more correct. But it’s also not a very big deal. Actually it matters more in code for search-ability but for documentation and comments? Give me a fucking break.
- madeofpalk 10mo agoIsn’t being technically correct an important thing for technical documentation that aims to be technically correct?
- threethirtytwo 10mo agoNo. Why would it be? I hate it when people come up with defense based off of linguistics. Your defense is essentially "technically correct" sounds like "technical documentation" therefore one applies to the other because of the word "technical". That's an incidence of language and NOT of reality. Let me frame if from a rational and logical perspective: Technical documentation is not a math proof. Its purpose is to transfer a working mental model to a human reader so they can make correct decisions. A document can be locally, pedantically correct and still be globally misleading if it emphasizes edge cases, omits constraints, or frames abstractions in a way that causes readers to generalize incorrectly. In practice, what matters is not whether every sentence can be defended in isolation, but whether the document reliably produces correct outcomes in the hands of its intended audience. A simplification that is technically incomplete but operationally accurate is often better documentation than a perfectly correct description that obscures the dominant behavior of the system. Engineers learn this the hard way. If you have ever followed documentation that was “technically correct” yet caused you to design the wrong thing, you already know this distinction matters. Correctness is necessary to an extent (and not to an excessive extent), but it is not sufficient. The goal is truthfulness at the level of use, not just sentence level defensibility.
- AbbeFaria 10mo agoTo anyone wanting to learn about OS development, nothing beats MIT 6.824. I finished the assignments in that course and that covers all the important aspects like processes, context switching, CPU modes, page tables and virtual memory and many other relevant topics like file systems, device drivers etc. And also it’s free. From the table of contents this course gets too involved in ancillary matters like bootloaders or the Rust language itself whereas the focus of any OS development tutorial should be on core concepts like how processes are implemented, how context switching works, how paging and consequently multi level page tables (actually, in code) work etc.
- keyshapegeo99 10mo agoOpening with a made-up quote (that is very simple to Google, which quickly confirms its apocryphal nature) doesn't inspire confidence in the factual accuracy of the remainder of the book...
- agluszak 10mo agoWhat do you mean by "made-up quote"? The author didn't make it up, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_journey_of_a_thousand_miles_begins_with_a_single_step https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_journey_of_a_thousand_miles_... This level of nit-picking is disheartening...
- captn3m0 10mo agoI think they meant: > "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein Which is listed at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Misattributed
- falcor84 10mo agoThe reference is most likely to: > "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Which TFA (and others) misattribute to Einstein
- rjrjeuu7 10mo agoFLY
- itsthecourier 10mo agowhat's FLY?
- osamabinladen 10mo agopretty sure it means cool like 'thats so fly'
- waschl 10mo agoSkipped through the first pages and I really like your approach. Avoiding to use „magic“ libraries which abstract away a lot of the intricacies the lower levels is helping with the understanding. I started my journey to develop my own little OS (https://github.com/jbreu/jos https://github.com/jbreu/jos ) based on phil opperman‘s tutorial but quickly diverged from his exactly due to his use of such libraries.
- golem14 10mo agoI wish instead of discussing typos, folks her who surely know better (or author) could shed light on how this project compares to the many other existing projects, like https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial, https://littleosbook.github.io/ https://littleosbook.github.io/, https://github.com/tuhdo/os01 https://github.com/tuhdo/os01, https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses?tab=readme-ov-file#systems https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses?tab=readme-ov... or even just "OPERATING SYSTEMS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION" by Tanenbaum
- nineteen999 10mo agoWell from what I can see all the examples you've linked are in C, and this one is Rust? That counts for something I guess?
- golem14 10mo agoWhat does that matter for learning how operating systems work? But even then, SAYING that this is an how-to-build-an-OS project similar to those others, but focused on Rust, would be quite helpful.
- cultofmetatron 10mo ago> What does that matter for learning how operating systems work? my rust is stronger than my c. been wanting to learn OS development and this being in somethign I already know lets me focus specifically on the os specific stuff rather than also needing to deepdive into c. a language I haven't so much as glanced at in almost 10 years
- nineteen999 10mo agoWell for a start C grew up next to the OS it was being used to build, so it was really intended for kernel/systems programming from the very get-go. Rust has taken a lot longer to get there. That's all.
- frizlab 10mo agoI should do the same book in Swift; it would be a very interesting project! I wish I had that kind of time…
- ajxs 10mo agoI always wonder why these guides stick to x86(-64). I get that it's still the most popular processor architecture for desktop computing, but it's got a lot of complex legacy baggage that's an unnecessary cognitive burden for beginners. It's also a relatively uncommon target for real-world bare metal development. Why not target RISC-V? I've done a lot of OSDev in both x86 and RISC-V, and I think RISC-V is much more teachable. You don't want to bog the reader down trying to understand what protected mode, or the A20 line is, when you could just focus on more universal concepts. In case anyone is curious, I very recently released a small demo kernel for RISC-V here: https://github.com/ajxs/straylight https://github.com/ajxs/straylight
- Sagi21805 10mo agoThis project started because I wanted to understand the linux that sits on my computer, which is x86. There is a possibility that on the future it will have multiple architectures supported, probably starting with arm, but I can't promise that
- shevy-java 10mo agoHmm. Although I am not the biggest fan of Rust, I am a huge fan of LFS/BLFS (https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/), so I am all in favour of more high quality information here, including the learnix-os website. Google search has become so useless in the last years that we all need to counter this evil force by improving existing documentation, as well as adding new high quality information - so from that point of view I am all in favour of such projects, even if the language is not my favourite one. Ideally we could have something like learnix for ALL languages, even the old ones, and even the slow ones. Rust is at the least fast, so it can be compared to C or C++, but I think we also need this top-down approach for, let's say something crazy ... python. (I get the "it is too slow" but this is more about education; plus, computers will become faster in the future too anyway.) The name learnix may not be ideal though if it focuses on just one programming language. It should be a bit more like LFS/BLFS, and even LFS focuses mostly on shell scripts; I'd prefer an agnostic instruction set, but then they can on top of that use shell scripts of course, with additional scripts in other languages (I adapted all of that stuff into ruby, for instance, although not in a high quality way such as LFS/BLFS e. g. some of those scripts and deployments I wrote lack documentation for other people to adjust and adapt, simply due to lack of time - but I try to improve the documentation whenever time permits, it just has a lower priority compared to other obligations or work-related things).
- throw-12-16 10mo agoIf you are interested in Nix but dont want to abandon MacOS you should check out Nix Darwin.
- yencabulator 10mo agoI feel like focusing on BIOS bootloaders and cylinders/heads/sectors that have been a lie for a very long time over UEFI & NVMe is just a weird choice, especially so when the code shown is Rust and not old C folklore.