15 ms·

I’m writing my own OS

• aeip 14y ago
  *Houston
  • theyshookhands 14y ago
    *whether
    • anonymouz 14y ago
      *useful
• robinh 14y ago
  Oh dear... overly ambitious plans, changing everything for the sake of change, fearing assembly, using VS for OS development, and not even knowing how the GDT and IDT work. There's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to begin. I sense a doomed project.
  • dreadsword 14y ago
    Nothing wrong with ambition! It will be a great learning experience if nothing else. Doomed = not commericailize-able? That doesn't mean its without value to the person behind it if they learn and derive satisfaction from the experience.
  • mhurron 14y ago
    > using VS for OS development What does Microsoft use?
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
      Microsoft has lots of great command line tools, I used MASM(Microsoft Macro Assembler) and the compiler and linker when I was learning (long long ago). Nothing is more flexible that command line tools as it lets you do scripting(programming your own environment). It does not matter if you want to use "already made by someone else windows, text, menus and buttons", but it is essential when you make (or manage what other people's make) everything.
    • robinh 14y ago
      My point wasn't that OS development is impossible in VS. However, given how much the OP seems to know about the subject, and the fact that virtually all resources about it presume that one is using a Linuxesque environment, I wouldn't recommend VS.
    • munin 14y ago
      the last I heard (3-4 years ago), the OS/kernel team used emacs. the kernel group has its own build infrastructure that is partially / mostly exported in the DDK.
      • marshray 14y ago
        Untrue! I know "kernel people" who use Vim, too! :-) However, my impression is most of them edit code in MSVC, build with the DDK tools, and debug with windbg/ntsd/kd like most other driver developers.
  • hnriot 14y ago
    While I certainly agree that knowledge of how interrupts work is foundational to writing an O/S, the comment about using VS is just silly. Last time I checked MASM was included.
    • robinh 14y ago
      Please see my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4833953 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4833953
  • jhuckestein 14y ago
    I had the opposite reaction. Many of the things the OP wants to change are really bothering me about "modern" operating systems. A recipe for coming up with good ideas is looking at something that has been around for a while and asking "What would it be like if it had been invented now?". And if all else fails, this will be a wonderful learning experience. I know this is a cliche, but before writing comments like this ask yourself if a) you are unnecessarily discouraging somebody for no reason and b) you would have said the same thing about successful projects when they were first started. Finally, the one piece of advice I'd give on this project is that you shouldn't focus too much on the overly ambitious goals and don't worry if you can't accommodate for all of them just yet. The likelihood of achieving the next milestone is somewhat proportional to the number of milestones you have achieved. Get to v0.01 and take it from there.
    • robinh 14y ago
      "I know this is a cliche, but before writing comments like this ask yourself if a) you are unnecessarily discouraging somebody for no reason and b) you would have said the same thing about successful projects when they were first started." a.) No, I don't think so. Considering the number of half-started kernels on OSdev.org, the creators of which incredibly often were convinced that they were going to create the newest awesomest kernel everyone is going to use, trying to get the OP to take a good look at his skillset seems like a proper thing to do. b.) I would have, if the creators seemed completely ignorant about the basics of what they were trying to do. This is not to say that I would tell the OP to give up on OS development - I personally love it. But I think a serious reality check is in order, and because we get people similar to the OP on the OSdev forums an awful lot, sometimes this frustrates me.
      • qu4z-2 14y ago
        I don't really expect OP to succeed, but I'm sure it'll be educational. And really, the more enthusiasm for a project the better.
    • bitwize 14y ago
      A recipe for coming up with good ideas is looking at something that has been around for a while Unix and asking "What would it be like if it had been invented now?". creat(2) would have the second 'e'.
  • nollidge 14y ago
    It's basically impossible for this to fail if you view the whole thing as a learning experience for the author.
  • mje__ 14y ago
    I've done quite a lot of (embedded) OS development in VS. It's a pretty nice experience, because you can generate a console app that you can use as an emulator that allows you to prototype really fast, and use your embedded toolchain when building for the device. With the obvious caveats that you write as much of your code to be cross-platform as possible, and be careful with endianness.
• pshc 14y ago
  I'd like to see someone try re-inventing a minimalist userspace. Create an OS running on the Linux kernel without coreutils, binutils etc., and see how far you can go. If you strip out loadable module support and such, is it possible to boot without the usual POSIX support structure? Without filesystems?
  • kapupetri 14y ago
    Something like Android?
  • kryptiskt 14y ago
    It is possible to have just the kernel and just what you want to run hardwired as the init process, say some minimal web server. A slightly more sane solution is to have a minimal init process that can respawn your server if it crashes. As for filesystems, there needs to be something, I don't think it can work at all without a root file system, but a ram disk will do fine. The FHS directory structure isn't needed at all of course. I've seen some ridiculously stripped down embedded Linux systems. Most tend to have something like Busybox though, with a fairly conventional look, but some prefer to just use that while developing and rip it out in the deployed version.
  • vidarh 14y ago
    I ported Linux to an embedded system that booted straight into ash (minimal shell). Other than ash, it only had custom applications. We didn't bother with a separate init app even - ash served that role sufficiently well. Linux has very minimal requirements of userspace - pretty much you need to have a process that will act as your init process that knows to wait to clean up any zombine processes now and again. The rest is pretty much up to how you want to organize things.
• jff 14y ago
  Take care when writing your own bootloader, or you may find yourself essentially maintaining two separate kernel trees.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  Wow!! Too ambitious. Doing that requires millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours to make. How do I know? I do electronics and low level programming work and I am really good at it. Just understanding the bugs that manufactures put in hardware and then solve in software(because it is way cheaper) takes a ton of work. As I suppose he is not super rich, he will have to convince people to join their project, a la Linus. Good luck with that!! I really wish a clean-no backwards compatible OS were real, I will add native OpenCL, OpenVG and OpenGL to the list, but my arachnid sense tells me a person that does not use Unix will have a hard time getting traction with geeks.
• wreckimnaked 14y ago
  > How to handle Interrupts in C? Will they perform as callbacks that await some return values or do I have to use inline assembly to process them correctly; Not to disappoint you, but you should try doing some more low level programming or dabbling with some existing OS code to have an idea how this kind of programs look like. Maybe having a look at Minix for a reference of simple OS? Have you thought about targeting ARM? Its architecture may be way less trickier than most Intel CPUs. Well, good luck with that. Worst case scenario, you'll end up reading lots of interesting resources.
  • wtracy 14y ago
    > Have you thought about targeting ARM? Its architecture may be way less trickier than most Intel CPUs. Can anyone comment on whether this is really true?
    • wreckimnaked 14y ago
      When comparing the Intel 64 [1] and ARMv6[2] instruction sets that's a quite trivial assumption. The difference on the number of instructions implemented by those architecture reflects well the complexity gap between both. Also, there are many other details that make targeting ARM much easier, for instance the bootloading process on ARM is more straightforward with no BIOS or EFI involved[3]. 1: http://download.intel.com/products/processor/manual/325462.pdf http://download.intel.com/products/processor/manual/325462.p... 2: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0432c/CHDCICDF.html http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.... 3: http://www.keil.com/download/docs/52.asp http://www.keil.com/download/docs/52.asp
• Geee 14y ago
  Good luck, I certainly hope you don't end up like losethos.
• mimog 14y ago
  Nope. If you want to know how to make a small OS that can run on a PC, take a look at xv6 which is a modern re-implementation of the sixth edition of Unix and is on Github. You can compile it and then run it in qemu. Fork it, read and understand the source and then expand upon it to your hearts content. That would at least give a very good starting point.
• drewmck 14y ago
  Please read Linus Torvald's book "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolution" http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620732 http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionar.... It mostly deals with his experience building Linux and the insane amount of work it took (he was a student at the time he wrote the first version, with the help of hundreds of other people via distributed development). It might give you some additional insight into the effort involved.
• olgeni 14y ago
  > No Unix directory tree. I hate it – it does not say anything to a user Actually it has a lot to say, but in this case it just appealed to the fifth amendment.
  • ante_annum 14y ago
    This is one of those times that the phrase "RTFM" actually makes sense. If the author had read what each one was rather than guessing, he'd have enjoyed it all a lot more. Nobody likes typing out "/system/configurations/networking". That's why they wound up with things like "/sys/conf/net". But hey, if he succeeds, maybe he'll come around.
    • fyolnish 14y ago
      Do you have any reason to assume he won't implement tab completion? Sure doesn't take long to write out /System/Library/[..] on os x
• merlish 14y ago
  Good luck, have fun.
• mvzink 14y ago
  Looks like you haven't even started thinking about the problems you'll run into architecting the actual mechanisms and policies of the operating system; process scheduling, virtual memory, etc. That's probably for the better—one thing at a time. For when you do get to that stage, I recommend Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
• dysoco 14y ago
  I like the idea of the directory tree, good luck! I have been interested in OS Development lately, I have read some of the James tutorial, the OsDev Wiki, and the Tanenbaum's book... but still have no idea what I'm doing.
• untog 14y ago
  I almost didn't post this comment because it makes me sound like such a killjoy, but: "I spend most of my days in the world of PHP, JavaScript (I love jQuery) and a little bit of HTML, CSS and ActionScript 3.0. I’ve done some hobby software development and also wrapped my head arround languages like C, C++ (except for templates), C# and Java." It sounds like you don't have the experience required to make an OS. I certainly don't either (I'm no C-head) so I am in no position to snark, but you're going to fail in this endeavour. That doesn't mean it's pointless, though- I think it'll be a tremendous learning experience in getting to grips with the core of how computers actually work. So, good luck. Just don't go thinking you're going to make the next Linux out of this. EDIT: It's also important to note that the author didn't submit this to HN. He didn't say "take this, HN amateurs!", he just posted something on his blog that someone else picked up.
  • samwilliams 14y ago
    Indeed. I always feel it is better for people in his position (attempting something so incredibly complex with a very low level of related experience) to do the work, then talk about it - rather than the other way around. Talk is cheap when you don't know what you are doing.
    • MaysonL 14y ago
      Then again, the flames may just make the guy a bit more determined – angry enough not to give up.
    • readymade 14y ago
      Talk is also cheap when you're talking about somebody else not knowing what they're doing.
  • javajosh 14y ago
    You know what, if you have hesitation about posting something, then you probably shouldn't. It's one thing to have a specific concern about his project, but it's quite another to call into question his skill as a programmer and indeed quite arrogant to assume that you know what it takes to build an OS. There is a big difference between saying "You don't have what it takes" and saying, "I think the obstacles you face will be very large, good luck!"
• agumonkey 14y ago
  I hope you know plan9 or other OSes beside *nix/POSIX so you have a larger field of view. If I had crossed the desire threshold to start that project (#1 project in my mind since I left college) I'd leave the C ecosystem altogether, design a typed ,functional ,binary friendly, modular, subset of C (and probably be forever alone). Something in the groove of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitC, even though its talented author concluded it wasn't a successful path.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• munin 14y ago
  Implementing an OS is hard work, even if you build on the very hard work of those who have tried before you in terms of APIs, abstraction layers, etc. It doesn't sound like you have a lot of familiarity with low-level software development, or software development in general, so you just took a "hard mode" project and cranked it up to "nightmare". Generally this is a bad idea because without any external motivation, you lose interest and stop working. With external motivation is worse, because you can burn out and become a catatonic shell of a person, staring absently into space for the rest of your life. Just some FYIs: > On the side note - It’s 21st century, but our PCs are still booting up as old-fart Intel 8086. You should read about EFI (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/unified-extensible-firmware-interface/efi-homepage-general-technology.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...) You should also read all of the lecture materials from good universities OS classes. In those classes, you basically do this. Some classes are more guided than others. Some places to start: - CMU: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/ - UMD: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~shankar/412-F12/ https://www.cs.umd.edu/~shankar/412-F12/ UMD uses a toy operating system called GeekOS that the students extend. You might find browsing its source code useful (http://code.google.com/p/geekos/ http://code.google.com/p/geekos/) Good luck!
  • willscott 14y ago
    There are a bunch of teaching OSes which are a great place to start for this stuff. The actively developed ones we chose between when teaching the OS class at UW this fall were: JOS (mit) https://github.com/guanqun/mit-jos https://github.com/guanqun/mit-jos Pintos (stanford) http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/ OS161 (harvard) http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~syrah/os161/ http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~syrah/os161/
• robomartin 14y ago
  Anyone who has ever written a small RTOS on a small 8 bit embedded processor will only laugh at the OP. And, I hate to say, it would be justified. There are about twenty or thirty books between where he is now and where he'd have to be in order to even start talking about designing an OS for a desktop platform. Add to that 10,000 hours of coding low to high-level projects across embedded to desktop platforms. A quick read of the "About" page is probably in order: http://gusc.lv/about/ http://gusc.lv/about/ What to say? "Someone holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain. Here's the tip of the tail: http://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Controller-Forth-8051-Family/dp/0125475705 http://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Controller-Forth-8051-Family/... http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/1118112733/ref=dp_ob_title_bk http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silb... http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Preemptive-Multitasking-Microprocessors-Microcontrollers/dp/0982337531/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353963610&sr=1-2&keywords=micro+c+os http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Preemptive-Multitasking-Mi... http://www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0132017997/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353963814&sr=1-3&keywords=operating+systems+design+and+implementation http://www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-... Have fun.
  • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    That's a bummer. Reading this article was inspirational.
    • endlessvoid94 14y ago
      Don't let this squash your inspiration. It won't stop this guy from learning what he needs to learn.
  • rthomas6 14y ago
    It's like a pilot writing about building his or her own plane.
    • Someone 14y ago
      Compared to building an OS and support libraies, building your own plane is trivial. Flying it may take balls, though. For the best example I know of: short video at http://www.joostconijn.org/film/vliegtuig/index.php http://www.joostconijn.org/film/vliegtuig/index.php. The guy built three planes. One didn't take of, one crashed, one brought him across Africa in short hops with landings at rebel-occupied airports where he didn't always manage to announce his arrival. Short thread at http://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/hangar-flying/12196-joost-conijn.html http://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/hangar-flying/12196.... (Apologies for deviating from the subject, but I figure hackers might find this interesting)
• kamme 14y ago
  Most of the comments seem so negative... When I was 16 I was also interested in OS development and actually wrote a bootsector, a very small kernel and support for fat12 in assembler. Previous experience? Basic and QBasic. It's quite a good way to learn and it is possible when you take one step at a time and are willing to spend some time reading... Your mind is a great tool, have some faith in it.
• sourc3 14y ago
  This is pretty interesting. I find this type of behavior to be everywhere in the software world. If I cannot figure something out with a platform, let me re-write it. Interesting observation is that the number of these "re-writes" is inversely proportional to the experience of the person proposing these ideas. Good luck to the author, nonetheless it will be a good learning experience for him.
  • geoka9 14y ago
    Also interesting is that once you start re-writing and bump into hard issues, you decide to take a peek at how others have solved them, you eventually find yourself understanding the platform you're trying to re-write and realize that maybe that platform is not as bad as you thought it were. "Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
• happywolf 14y ago
  The Unix/Linux systems are designed by a lot of very smart people and have gone through many iterations. No doubt they do have some historical baggage, but, there are good reasons why the current design is as-is. Not trying to learn the history will doomed to repeat it.
• drivebyacct2 14y ago
  [deleted] ChuckMcM is right, let him find out what he doesn't know. Props for the ambition.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Sigh, folks give the guy a break. Sure he doesn't know what he doesn't know, but he has decided to fix that. Which, if you know your history, is not a whole lot different than Linus back when he was calling out Minix for being crap. The challenge here is that the barrier to speaking on the interwebs is quite low so you can make a fool of yourself if you're not careful. Jean Labrosse, who wrote uC/OS (which everyone called mucos), in his original thesis statement made many of these exact same arguments. And like your author he made some choices that he felt were reasonable, only to learn through experience that perhaps they weren't a well thought out as he had hoped. I am a huge fan of people just saying "How hard can it be?" and jumping in. Enjoy the ride, they can surprise you if you under estimate them. So assuming this person notes that they are getting a ton of traffic from HN, and comes here to investigate, my three suggested books are : Operating System Concepts [1], Operating System Implementation [2], and The Design of UNIX [3]. Preferably in that order. Any decent college library should have all three in the stacks. [1] www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Seventh-Edition/dp/0471694665/ [2] www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementation-3rd/dp/0131429388/ [3] www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0132017997/
  • danellis 14y ago
    I agree. There's nothing wrong with what the guy's doing. He'll learn a lot from it, and I wish him well. It's also good to be writing about the things you do, successful or not. It's not even remotely newsworthy, though.
    • ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Agreed it isn't newsworthy, but it can be inspirational to a reader who hasn't had the 'guts' to take this leap. I'm sure a lot of people reading HN think about writing a new OS it's one of the archetypes [1]. So seeing someone take the plunge can be liberating. Seeing him get slammed on the site can be de-motivating so I was hoping to counter some of that. Back when I was doing a Java based OS I spent a lot of time reading the basic kernel in eCos which had a very nice packaging an build system. I would not have invested that time if I hadn't been aspiring to other things. [1] Programmers seem to come in 3 archetypes; the systems guy who dreams of building a new OS, the language guy who dreams of building a new programming language, and the networking guy who dreams of building a new protocol. Some folks are parts of all three, I once thought if you wrote an RPG where the characters were coders these three areas would be where you would add skill points.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• husam212 14y ago
  Writing new OS entirely from scratch? without any intention to rely on some useful parts of previous projects? This is literally what we call "Reinventing The Wheel", and if you go through human history you will find that this is absolutely NOT the best way of development.
  • readymade 14y ago
    If that were true then there would only be one wheel design in all of human history.
• mrng 14y ago
  "I still don’t understand the meaning and differences between /bin, /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin" Oh. OK, then.
• Xcelerate 14y ago
  I think people are being overly pessimistic. It's not that ambitious of a project (particularly a hobby project at that). Why? Well, he doesn't have to support thousands of different drivers and hardware configurations -- he only needs code that supports his own. That eliminates a good chunk of the OS code. Second, a lot of grunt-code can be found in open source projects, so most of the tedious/time-consuming programming can be eliminated if he chooses to follow this option. Drop preemptive multitasking, cache-optimization, modes, virtual memory, and networking and there's not too much left. And finally, it doesn't take that long to understand the GDT. Mine became corrupted once so I took a day to learn how it worked -- fixed that crap in a hex editor. So no, he's probably not going to invent the next highly polished OS that handles every edge case and has been rigorously tested against bugs, but then again I don't think it's unreasonable to see a simple little functional OS.
  • ante_annum 14y ago
    As someone who's just started on a less ambitious OS project, I couldn't agree more. I'm writing basically exclusively for legacy hardware because I'm not expecting to run it outside of QEMU, but one of the reasons Linux took so many man hours to write is because it runs on everything while maintaining stability. If you recall, Linus started writing specifically for his own machine and everybody hopped on the wagon for their own.
  • mje__ 14y ago
    Sounds like you still don't understand the GDT :) [1] I agre with you, though. As with any hobby project, picking the bits that are interesting or fun makes it easy to keep going. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Descriptor_Table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Descriptor_Table (maybe you're thinking of the GPT?)
    • Xcelerate 14y ago
      D'oh. Slaps forehead.
• readme 14y ago
  If any of you naysayer arsehats (you know who you are) bothered reading to the bottom of his article, you'd have seen that he has a section where you (if you do indeed know about OS development) could help him by answering his questions. I pasted it below for reference: ----------------------------------------------------------- My research What I’ve found out so far: Boot sequence: BIOS; Master Boot Record (MBR); Bootloader – the program that takes it over from MBR and loads your Kernel; Kernel. How to write your own MBR and write it to Disk on windows. I’ve written a small utility in Visual C++ that allows directly to read/write from disk (download here, source included for Visual Studio 2010 Express); How to write bare bones C kernel entry point. How to write “naked” functions on Windows in Visual Studio Missing link - I still don’t know how to properly step from MBR to Bootloader to Kerlen, that is – write your own MBR code that would load bootloader, pass the execution to bootloader that would load and pass execution to bare bones C kernel: What exactly is Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT), and how it looks in C and Assembly? How and when, and again how, if when is later (for example in Long Mode or Protected Mode) to set up all this GDT and IDT stuff. They say you have to set it up before the kernel. Then they say you can set it up with dummy values and set it up later in kernel. Then they say, that to set it up, you have to be in Real Mode, so your kernel (which might be way over 1Mb of real mode space), needs to switch between modes. And then if your kernel is over 1Mb, you can’t access memory locations after 1Mb, and so on… It’s confusing, but I’m going to find it out and post it here later on. How to handle Interrupts in C? Will they perform as callbacks that await some return values or do I have to use inline assembly to process them correctly; Is it possible to write MBR in C? I do understand that you still have to set ORG to 7c00h, and use some specific assembly instructions, but if they could be wrapped in C using inline assembly and C entry point can be glued with few lines of assembly code, why not?
• chewxy 14y ago
  There is a surprising amount of negativity coming from what I expect to be a 'hacker' crowd. This kid (he's 30 can I call him a kid?) has ambition and what appears to be the drive to create his own OS - I mean, if you read the bottom of his page, he did some research (sure, wiki-ing them is not equal to actually understanding them), but it at least shows willingness to learn, and we should not be putting him down at all. Sometimes the HN crowd surprises me. We pride ourselves in being hackers, most often idealistic (bitcoins and patent law change anyone?) but when a singular person shows idealistic ambition, we immediately engage in poppy cutting. Sigh.
  • wissler 14y ago
    I'm surprised by the opposite: I have come to expect this kind of negativity here at HN, but about half the comments are like yours.
  • Deestan 14y ago
    I think his enthusiasm and attempts are good things. But. His post is just that - his expression of enthusiasm. There's not much of anything else here yet. We have nothing to discuss but his enthusiasm. Having seen these kinds of ideas consistently end up as "well... it got hard" a week later, it triggers my grumpy "sure whatever let me know how it goes in a month" reflex.
• endlessvoid94 14y ago
  I'll be following this. Don't listen to the hate -- dive in, I'm sure you'll learn a ton, and maybe build something useful for yourself and others. This is the exact definition of hacking, if you ask me.
• jiggy2011 14y ago
  Won't be big and professional like gnu. Seriously though, good luck.
• frozenport 14y ago
  3rd Year ECE + Hope . How did this make HN?
• steve8918 14y ago
  I don't think writing your own OS is as difficult as people are saying. You're not trying to compete against Windows or Linux, you just want to get something up and running. I'm sure bugs and crashes will be prevalent, but I'm sure it would be a great project. A really, really good book for this that I've read is "Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System" by Richard Burgess. It starts you from the beginning, and walks you through all the steps in writing a really basic OS. It's old and out of print, but it's definitely the best one I've seen. Edit: I just found the website, they are offering the book free here: http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl.html http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl.html
  • bproctor 14y ago
    I've wrote my own OS back in the late '90s based heavily on this book. Probably one of the best learning experiences I've had. I'm not sure how relevant it is today. I'd love to see a second edition brought up to date.
• ommunist 14y ago
  Read books, Guncha! Good luck. If Stallman did that, so can you.
• polymathist 14y ago
  UPDATE: The original author has posted a Part 2. Looks like he's already started writing code and hitting milestones. http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-p2/ http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-p2/
• capkutay 14y ago
  I would look at the Design of Unix. That's what Linus used to make Linux. Individually study everything you don't understand... Also, prepare for about 6 months of hard yet rewarding, given that you put in about 50 hours a week ;)
• bitteralmond 14y ago
  I agree that this project is hugely ambitious for one man. So was Linux. Linus recruited a bunch of other hobby programmers to help him make it. Although he may be jumping the gun on announcing it, he's got a lot of good ideas about stripping back all the obfuscation that's resulted from 30 years of stacking things onto the same old conventions and wiggling them around until they fit. I'm sure the idea of building a modern OS that is straightforward and written in a simple, popular language like C (and possibly Python later for higher-level stuff) will appeal to a wide range of people who will all want to help. I'd love to see this project happen, and if the day comes where Gusts is calling for help, I'll be right there in line to help him make this.
• robomartin 14y ago
  On threads such as this one it is easy --and even popular-- to dump on those, such as myself, who come down on the "nay" side, even when this is firmly based on experience and having made plenty of mistakes in the field. The linked article does NOT talk about a one-semester school project or a quick-and-simple learning OS. No, the article talks about a web developer with no real experience writing low-level code not only wanting to bootstrap every single device driver but also ignoring years of accumulated knowledge and code libraries to write an OS that boots directly into graphical mode, does not take advantage of POSIX and more. There's nothing wrong with the "How hard can it be?" approach to learning. I've done this many times. And almost every single time I came away with "I sure learned a lot, but what the fuck was I thinking?". The last time I pulled one of those was about fifteen years ago and the "three month project" took nearly two years. What he is talking about is more complex than writing the Linux kernel from scratch because he wants to re-invent everything. Here are some stats on the Linux kernel: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development... Even if his project was 10% of this it would still be a grotesque miscalculation for a single developer, otherwise employed and without the experience to back-up some of what he is proposing. If, on the other hand, the post had suggested something like this it would have been far more reasonable an idea: "Hey, I just spent a year implementing everything in the Tanenbaum book. Now I would like to start from that base and enhance the OS to make it do this...". Let's compare notes in a year and see how far he got.
• ww520 14y ago
  Sigh. I don't know what to say. I admire OP's desire to dive into OS development but I hope he has the perseverance to carry it through, because he has a long way to fill in the huge gaps in his knowledge to build an OS.
• readymade 14y ago
  I could have guessed this would turn into a massive flamefest, but c'mon people. So what if he's green? This will be a learning experience for him. And I'll hazard that in the end, even if he never ends up writing a whole OS from scratch, that he will have gained more valuable low level experience than the vast majority of those here.
• capkutay 14y ago
  I would avoid the project unless you truly understand the scope of what you're doing and are dying to get your hands dirty with vm and filesys implementation despite little reward (other than the satisfaction of learning). OS dev is quite low level and infamously hard to debug
• desireco42 14y ago
  I think his critique of linux files layout and other points made are completely spot on. Me and I am sure others often were thinking how it would be great if things were different. I happen to know why those folders are named as they are, and they are completely arbitrary. He also started on it, did some initial progress. So he did a php before, boo-hoo. I would prefer he decided to fork linux and change things he didn't like, then start from skratch. However, there is a great value starting from scratch. I wish I had a life :) to join him and figure out things together, it would be a blast, how many times in your life you have a chance to work on actual modern OS. I believe it is totally possible for him to accomplish what he started, if knowledgeable people would join him and work with project together. Today with amazing tools, it is good time to create a new OS that would have modern tooling. I wrote recently on my blog about a need for developer distribution of linux. Strangely this is still missing. http://softwaredevelopmentinchicago.com/2012/10/17/ubuntu-all-the-missed-chances/ http://softwaredevelopmentinchicago.com/2012/10/17/ubuntu-al... It is great that we are discussing this. That is how things start.
• olalonde 14y ago
  I am reminded of http://www.sparrowos.com/ http://www.sparrowos.com/ (aka losethos).
• DannyBee 14y ago
  Today's modern interfaces are tomorrow's obsolete ones. It's not like PCIe will last any longer than PCI, PCI-X, ISA, Vesa Local Bus, EISA, etc.
  • zanny 14y ago
    I don't see why we aren't nearing a threshold where we can do all system interconnects over some specificed serial digital interface and a parallel one. Past a point, it becomes more logical than trying to optimize edge case performants of things (like how dvi is uni-directional raw video digraphs) you can just have some usb-like (but not usb, usb is ugly and tacky and a mess) digital connector for every peripheral from the monitor to the network adapter to the speakers, maybe even off one controller with software handling the handshakes to determine what everything is connected to. And then get rid of sata/pci/sas etc internal connectors and just use the same interconnect hub as the external devices. Again, handshakes to determine device connectivity. Wouldn't that be so easy? One connection to rule them all! I'm not trying to say it would be easy to get to, we are mired in a world where we look at a concept like this and say "how dumb, you aren't utilizing a bidirectional link with video feeds, or you aren't using the power connectivity to a network router, or stream based vs packet based trasport layers having speed / bandwidth advantages over one or the other. But wouldn't it be great to plug a new gpu into a real universal serial bus?
• luxxx 14y ago
  Why not just improve upon Linux rather than act like an asshat and post to HN? The path to Linux kernel contribution is simple. Learn C -> Master C -> Contribute -> Stop posting to HN
  • Goranek 14y ago
    jerk
    • luxxx 14y ago
      yeah, free speech sucks when you don't agree with it. :((
• monochromatic 14y ago
  Write your own OS: great! Say you're writing your own OS: ok, sure...
• zanny 14y ago
  I love little thought experiments like this, so heres my 2 cents: 1. Targeting a modern architecture is good, but if I were being this ambitious, I would wager having such a backwards compatable burdened architecture like x86_64 (even when it is highly performant just through raw funding dollars) I would still rather start at square 1 on some risc 64 bit virtual 48 bit physical word system. Go even further, and design such a hardware ecosystem with heterogeneous computing built into the foundations - have arbitrary numbers of ALUs and FPUs and have different pipeline structures allowing for various degrees of SIMD parallelism across some tightly integrated weak cores and more heavily pipelined and bulkier serial cores, and have an intelligent enough instruction set to allow for scheduling (or even better, the hardware itself) to recognize parallel tasks and execute them with varying degrees of parallelism. Take AMD Fusion or Tegra to the next level and instead of having a discrete gpu and cpu on one die mash them together and share all the resources. 2. I'd kick C out. If I'm going with a new architecture, I need to write the compiler from scratch anyway. I might consider LLVM for such a system, just because the intermediary assembly layer is intentionally lossless and allows for backwards language compatability with everything under the sun right now. But ditch C, take modern language concepts from C++, Python etc, and cut down on the glyphic syntax and try rethinking the distribution of special characters (I think pointer<int> c makes more sense than int (star)c, for example - go even further, and provide 3 levels of verbosity for each concept, like pointer<int32> c, ptr<int32> c, and &:i32 c). I would definitely want to fix standard type sizes at the least, having things like i32 integers instead of the int type being 16 or 32 bit, etc, with some more modern niceities like the D style real float that uses the architecture restricted maximum FPU register size). 3. Screw UEFI, mainly because it is a design by consortium concept - it is inherently cumbersome because it was a commitee project between industry giants rather than a revolution in booting. I do like cutting down on legacy interfaces, I'd go even further and try to minimize my system to (in theory) one serial transport and one digital, maybe 4, with unidirectional and bidirectional versions of both, and maybe support for some classic analog busses (like audio, which doesn't make much sense to transport in digital format, although I haven't looked into it much). Everything plug and play, everything attempting to provide power over a channel so you don't need additional power connectivity if you can avoid it. For the BIOS, I would replace it with some metric of scan busses for profiles -> incite some kind of device-wise self test -> provide device information in memory to the payload binary, to allow memory mapping and all the other goodness. Maybe even have the bios itself act as a sub-kernel and provide the mapping itself. Maybe even fork the kernel, and treat it like some kind of paravirtualized device environment where the bios never overrides itself with the payload but instead stays active as a device interface. Saves a lot of code redundancy between the two then. It would of course have an integrated bootloader and the ability to parse storage device trees for some bootable material. Maybe have file system standards where each partition has a table of pointers to loadable binaries somewhere, or maybe stick them in some partition table entry (obviously not a FS expert here). 4. Screw URIs, go straight for a kernelwise VFS that can reference everything. I'd love to see /net/<IP address>/ referening the top level of some remote servers public resources. You could have a universal network protocol where each connection is treated as a virtual mount, and individual files (and everything is a file, of course) can dictate if they use streamed or packet based data off some network transaction about the base protocol. So instead of having http://google.com http://google.com, you could use /net/google.com/ which when opened does DNS resolution in the VFS to 74.125.224.72 (well, ipv6, obviously - we are talking about a new OS here, so 2001:4860:8006::62 - and as a side note, I would never try to get rid of IP as the underlying transport protocol - as insane I might be about redesigning hardware and rethinking stuff people much smarter than myself came up with, I know you will never ursurp IP as the network trasport everyone uses to connect the world ever). And then when you open google.com/search, you open a remote file that interprets the "arguements" of ?q=baconatorextreme on the extension into the returned page file that you access. I agree with getting rid of Unix directories, they are outdated crappy, and all their names make no sense. However, /bin is meant to be system required binaries to boot, where sbin is root utility binaries, /usr/bin is general purpose executables that might not be local to the machine and might be a remote mount, and /usr/local/bin is the local machines installed binaries. Of course these polcies are never abided by, and they still have /etc, /usr/games, and a bunch of other folders to make life a hassle. That's enough rates for a HN comment thread though, I'll stop and spare y'all :P
• robomartin 14y ago
  OK, if you don't have any real experience in low-level embedded coding (relevant to device drivers), RTOS or OS design in general, file systems, data structures, algorithms, interfaces, etc. And, if you have "hobby level" experience with Assembler, C and C++. And, if your intent is to write a desktop OS, from the ground up, without making use of existing technologies, drivers, file systems, memory management, POSIX, etc. Here's a list of books that could be considered required reading before you can really start to write specifications and code. Pick twenty of these and that might be a good start. In no particular order: 1- http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-Language-2nd-Edition/dp/0131103628/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-Language-2nd-Edition/dp/... 2- http://www.amazon.com/The-Answer-Book-Solutions-Programming/dp/0131096532/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/The-Answer-Book-Solutions-Programming/... 3- http://www.amazon.com/The-Standard-Library-P-J-Plauger/dp/0131315099/ref=pd_sim_b_3 http://www.amazon.com/The-Standard-Library-P-J-Plauger/dp/01... 4- http://www.amazon.com/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0201179288/ref=pd_sim_b_8 http://www.amazon.com/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0201... 5- http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp/0131774298/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp... 6- http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-In-Noel-Kalicharan/dp/1438253273/ref=pd_sim_b_9 http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-In-Noel-Kalicharan/dp/... 7- http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Using-Aaron-Tenenbaum/dp/0131997467/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Using-Aaron-Tenenbaum/... 8- http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Algorithms-C-Kyle-Loudon/dp/1565924533/ref=pd_sim_b_14 http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Algorithms-C-Kyle-Loudon/dp/... 9- http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=pd_sim_b_53 http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Const... 10- http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612/ref=pd_sim_b_3 http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Obje... 11- http://www.amazon.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/ref=pd_sim_b_11 http://www.amazon.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month-Engineering-Ann... 12- http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-4th-Edition/dp/0321563840/ref=pd_sim_b_5 http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-4th-Edition/d... 13- http://www.amazon.com/The-Standard-Library-Tutorial-Reference/dp/0321623215/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y http://www.amazon.com/The-Standard-Library-Tutorial-Referenc... 14- http://www.amazon.com/API-Design-C-Martin-Reddy/dp/0123850037/ref=pd_sim_b_6 http://www.amazon.com/API-Design-C-Martin-Reddy/dp/012385003... 15- http://www.amazon.com/The-Linux-Programming-Interface-Handbook/dp/1593272200/ref=pd_sim_b_8 http://www.amazon.com/The-Linux-Programming-Interface-Handbo... 16- http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-Edition/dp/0136108040/ref=pd_sim_b_1 http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti... 17- http://www.amazon.com/System-Programming-Unix-Adam-Hoover/dp/0136067123/ref=pd_sim_b_4 http://www.amazon.com/System-Programming-Unix-Adam-Hoover/dp... 18- http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Programming-Concept-Frantisek-Franek/dp/0521520436/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Programming-Concept-Frantisek-F... 19- http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Management-Implementations-Programming-Development/dp/1556223471/ref=pd_sim_b_3 http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Management-Implementations-Prog... 20- http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Filesystems-Evolution-Design-Implementation/dp/0471164836/ref=pd_sim_b_16 http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Filesystems-Evolution-Design-Impl... 21- http://www.amazon.com/PCI-System-Architecture-4th-Edition/dp/0201309742/ref=pd_sim_b_1 http://www.amazon.com/PCI-System-Architecture-4th-Edition/dp... 22- http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Serial-System-Architecture-Edition/dp/0201309750/ref=pd_sim_b_3 http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Serial-System-Architecture-E... 23- http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-PCI-Express-Hardware-Developers/dp/0970284691/ref=pd_sim_b_4 http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-PCI-Express-Hardware-Deve... 24- http://www.amazon.com/Serial-Storage-Architecture-Applications-High-Performance/dp/0971786186/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Serial-Storage-Architecture-Applicatio... 25- http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Storage-Technology-Serial-ATA/dp/0977087816/ref=pd_sim_b_1 http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Storage-Technology-Serial-ATA/dp/... 26- http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/ref=pd_sim_b_7 http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Inte... 27- http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Assembly-Language-Programmer/dp/0764579010/ http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Assembly-Language-Program... 28- http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-3rd-Edition/dp/0672329468/ref=pd_sim_b_6 http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-3rd-Edition/d... 29- http://www.amazon.com/Version-Control-Git-collaborative-development/dp/1449316387/ http://www.amazon.com/Version-Control-Git-collaborative-deve... 30- http://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Software-Primer-David-Simon/dp/020161569X/ref=pd_sim_b_6 http://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Software-Primer-David-Simon/d... 31- http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Embedded-Systems-C/dp/1565923545/ref=pd_sim_b_4 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Embedded-Systems-C/dp/1565... 32- http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Software/dp/1449302149/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Softw... 33- http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/1118112733/ref=dp_ob_title_bk http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silb... 34- http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Preemptive-Multitasking-Microprocessors-Microcontrollers/dp/0982337531/ http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Preemptive-Multitasking-Mi... 35- http://www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0132017997/ http://www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-... 36- http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Network-Programming-Sockets-Networking/dp/0131411551/ http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Network-Programming-Sockets-Netwo... 37- http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Volume-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0321336313/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Volume-Addison-Wesley-... 38- http://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Vol-Implementation/dp/020163354X/ref=pd_sim_b_5 http://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Vol-Implementation/... 39- http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Vol-Transactions-Protocols/dp/0201634953/ref=pd_sim_b_5 http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Vol-Transactions-Proto... 40- http://www.amazon.com/User-Interface-Design-Programmers-Spolsky/dp/1893115941/ http://www.amazon.com/User-Interface-Design-Programmers-Spol... 41- http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Jenifer-Tidwell/dp/1449379702/ http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Jenifer-Tidwell/d... 42- http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Jenifer-Tidwell/dp/1449379702/ http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Jenifer-Tidwell/d... 43- http://www.amazon.com/Programming-POSIX-Threads-David-Butenhof/dp/0201633922/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353993641&sr=1-4&keywords=multithreaded+programming http://www.amazon.com/Programming-POSIX-Threads-David-Butenh... 44- http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/hwsw/software/hd-gma#documents http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/hwsw/software/hd-gma#d... 45- http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-software-developer-manuals.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectu... 46- http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/hwsw/hardware/core-b75/hardware http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/hwsw/hardware/core-b75... 47- http://www.hdmi.org/index.aspx http://www.hdmi.org/index.aspx 48- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface 49- http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Device-Drivers-Sreekrishnan-Venkateswaran/dp/0132396556/ http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Device-Drivers-Sreekrishnan-... 50- http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Software/dp/1449302149/ http://www.amazon.com/Making-Embedded-Systems-Patterns-Softw... 51- http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Introduction-Computer-Science/dp/1590282418/ http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Introduction-Comput... 52- http://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giampaolo/dp/1558604979/ http://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giampa... 53- http://www.amazon.com/File-Systems-Structures-Thomas-Harbron/dp/0133147096/ref=pd_sim_b_3 http://www.amazon.com/File-Systems-Structures-Thomas-Harbron... 54- ...well, I'll stop here. Of course, the equivalent knowledge can be obtained by trial-and-error, which would take longer and might result in costly errors and imperfect design. The greater danger here is that a sole developer, without the feedback and interaction of even a small group of capable and experienced programmers could simply burn a lot of time repeating the mistakes made by those who have already trenched that territory. If the goal is to write a small RTOS on a small but nicely-featured microcontroller, then the C books and the uC/OS book might be a good shove in the right direction. Things start getting complicated if you need to write such things as a full USB stack, PCIe subsystem, graphics drivers, etc.
• grundprinzip 14y ago
  Good luck and thumbs up for the idea of writing a new OS. I think an inspiration would be to look at BareMetal OS, perhaps you can find some ideas there. http://www.returninfinity.com/baremetal.html http://www.returninfinity.com/baremetal.html
• exDM69 14y ago
  This guy is slightly clueless but he has the spirit. I've written my own hobby operating system skeleton and it was a very good learning experience. Here's a few notes about his plans: > Target modern architecture > Avoid legacy, drop it as fast as you can. You can even skip the Protected mode and jump directly to Long mode I went on and wrote my hobby OS on x86_64 too. Unfortunately, working in x86_64 long mode is a little bit more difficult than using 32 bit protected mode. You can go direct to long mode, but you'll have to write that from scratch. GRUB and other multiboot protocol capable bootloaders set up 32-bit protected mode for you but not long mode. You cannot be in long mode without paging enabled (unlike in protected mode). So if you want to "skip" protected mode, you'll have to write a pile of assembly code to get there. x86_64 is a lot more work than 32bit x86. > Jump to C as soon as possible This is most definitely the right thing to do. Jump into C code as soon as possible. Getting shit done in Assembly is so much slower. You only need a few pieces of assembly code to get an operating system running: the boot code and the interrupt handler code. The boot code and the interrupt handler are just small trampolines that go to C code as soon as possible. In addition to the boot and interrupt handler code, you occasionally need to use some privileged mode CPU instructions (disable interrupts or change page table, etc). Use inline assembler for that. Anyone who (in this thread) suggested using something else than C seemed to be fairly clueless about it. Of the choices you have available, C is the simplest way to go. Everything else is either more work or more difficult. > Forget old interfaces like PCI, IDE, PS/2, Serial/Parallel ports. Not so fast. You most likely want to implement a serial console for your operating system. Maybe even add a serial port debugging interface (GDB stubs). You're most likely going to have to deal with PCI bus at some point too, although many devices don't use the physical pci buses on motherboards, some devices still hook up to the pci bus. Look at the output of "lspci" on Linux, all of those devices are accessed through PCI. This includes USB, PCIe, SATA, IDE, Network interfaces, etc. Again, using the modern buses is a lot more work than using the old ones and it partially builds upon the old things. > Why does every tutorial still use such an ancient device as Floppy? Because when doing a bootloader from scratch for a tutorial, it's a lot easier to use the floppy disk than it is to use a real hard disk or any other media. > Avoid the use of GRUB or any other multiboot bootloader – make my own and allow only my own OS on the system No no no. If you want to build an operating system, do not build a bootloader. Use the multiboot protocol and things will be a lot easier. You'll get started so much faster and get to the real stuff sooner. (NOTE: I don't know how UEFI devices boot, it might contain something like multiboot). Most hobby operating systems are just half-assed stage 1 bootloaders. Just get over the fact that you'll have to use code written by others and get booted. Popular emulators (bochs, qemu) can boot multiboot kernels directly so you'll save a lot of time there too. You need to get booted in an emulator and running under a debugger as quickly as possible. Operating system development is so much easier to do with a debugger at hand. Failures generally cause a boot loop or hang the device so there won't be a lot of diagnostics to help with issues. So my advice is: set up Qemu + GDB + multiboot, and get your kernel booted in a debugger as early as you can. I won't go into commenting his wacky ideas about VFS structure or APIs. It's nice to make great plans up front but by the time you're booted to your own kernel, a lot of the naïve ideas you started with will be "corrected". Happy hacking and do not listen to the naysayers. PS. here's my hobby OS: http://github.com/rikusalminen/danjeros http://github.com/rikusalminen/danjeros
• guilloche 14y ago
  As many people here said, this guy may not know what he doesn't know. But I am admiring his braveness and it is good thing for someone to shoulder off all legacy burdens and start a fresh OS. As a developer, I have similar feeling on softwares including OSes, and I started a fresh vector editor project(Torapp guilloche online designer http://www.torapp.info http://www.torapp.info), I know a vector editor is much simpler than an OS, but it is also pretty complicated. When designing the editor, I learned a lot and changed designs multiple times. I am sure that guy will learn and even if he can not complete an OS, he may leave some well-designed code base for other people to start with.
• emeidi 14y ago
  I remember a guy saying the same a few years ago ... what's his name? Linus?
• nnq 14y ago
  Short advice: find a compiler that supports modern decent C (C99), NOT VS (http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/05/vs_c99_support/ http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/05/vs_c99_support/) - may not be relevant for your kernel code that much, but at least at the end of your adventure you will have learned how to write good modern C (and no, C it not dead and replaced by C++, they are languages with different philosophies and used by different kinds of programmers and they are both evolving on they own route, despite FUD originating from Microsoft and other sources) ...and when you reach to the GUI part, do the same for C++, use the latest version and language features: I've heard that VS2012 lasts upgrade got closer to it, but google around before settling on it ...or to keep it simpler: better use GCC compilers (since the Linux kernel is built with it, you should find enough compiler specific docs and related tools too)
• djhworld 14y ago
  This is cool. Big project for one person, but cool none the less
• christina_b 14y ago
  Good lord ...
• gusc 14y ago
  Holly jumping Jesus … I just got my 15 minutes of shame/fame over the internet. I linked my “just write down what you’re thinking” blog post on dzone.com and somehow it got posted on Hacker News and from there … Shit just hit the fan. It seems that writing “I’m writing my own OS” as a blog title can be translated from “I have spare time, I want to try out new things” into “Fuck this shit, I’m going for a revolution!!!” It’s time consuming to answer all the comments I’ve gained, so I’m writing this post as an answer to all of you. http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-intermission/ http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-intermission/ And thank you again for inspiration (even the cynicism is inspirational ;)
• dindresto 14y ago
  OS development can be fun. I'm writing a hobby OS myself, but currently using GRUB. GDT and interrupts are working, so I can already e.g. get keyboard input. But there's nothing like usermode programs yet. I'm 16, so what bcantrill said might be true ("there is a certain arrogance of youth here").