Show HN: I made my own OS from scratch because I was bored
26 comments
·February 12, 2025changexd
Great work! I'm usually bored too, sometimes I find something to study or try to implement known tech, but only give up when I feel like it's too hard for me or it's too much work haha, this motivates me a bit.
teruakohatu
There has perviously been a nice guide posted on HN on getting code to run on bare metal:
mysterydip
> I made it and I'm proud of that
And that's all that matters for a hobby project. Congrats!
zeroq
anyone remembers Argante (https://argante.sourceforge.net/concept.html)?
ktbwrestler
Great job, something like this is also a really great way to get your foot in the door with a job when the time comes.
I like that you have the site in both Spanish and English!
Jotalea
Yeah, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and since I'm planning to share this project in Hispanic communities too, it would be bad to not have my own language in it.
Though following that logic, I should also make my OS in Spanish too... I guess I could add some kind of translation dictionary, I'm not sure. I guess I'll do it in the future.
thereticent
I'm impressed with your dedication and also amazed that I ran into this on HN. My 9-year-old just showed me your Geometry Dash remake in Scratch. You're like a legend to him and his friends!
ranger_danger
How can we download only the source code?
Jotalea
The source code comes in a bundle that includes a compiler, an emulator, and some extra tools. While I don't see an advantage on downloading the source code alone, I won't deny it.
Just note that there are three different "branches":
- stable: This is the one being distributed in the website
- neofetch: This one exists because I couldn't get the ASCII art to fit within 512 bytes along with the rest of features
- multistage (untested): Here I'm trying to work with jumps in memory to handle different commands and features (and include them all in one release). I read online that I can compile them separately and then merge the binaries to get jumps to work. But I haven't finished it, and it probably won't compile as it is right now.
That said, here is the source code for all of them: https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/wB9kfq1umxW2
edit: fixed missing newlines
gtirloni
Nice accomplishment. I usually do things because I'm excited about something :)
asdf0987
despite saying it's open source, there's no link to read source code e.g github.
ranger_danger
why do you think that is a requirement to being called open source?
freedomben
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a project claiming to be "open source" provide the source code in some form. It needn't be on github (GP merely sites Github as an example), but there should at least be a link of some kind, whether a zip file or a git remote or something. It's not a requirement, but it is something that most people (reasonably IMHO) expect.
ranger_danger
but there is a link
>Dev Kit includes distribution of a cut down QEMU x86_64 emulator, ASM compiler and source code, along with extra utilities. These are packaged with a win32 platform in mind.
martzy13
I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement, But when I think open source - I usually think about being able to browse the code in some type of repository, in a human readable format.
I like to browse a codebase in some way that I don’t have to download and unzip an unknown set of files.
seanw444
Open source != provided source control repository
ranger_danger
I understand you prefer to be able to browse the code online, and that does seem to be largely the norm with most projects, but from a technical/legal perspective, my understanding is that the only actual requirement is that source code is provided if requested, they don't even have to post it anywhere on the Internet in advance. It could just have been emailed to you or something. But people usually put a link up somewhere just to make it easier.
krylon
Respect! This is really cool!
colesantiago
Nice job, keep it up!
caspper69
The page isn't in English, but Google helpfully translated it for me.
Without source, and only those commands available, it's kind of difficult to see what you've implemented and how far you progressed.
Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection? Do you ever jump to a user space context?
Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
Like Groundhog Day, I have been doing this over and over and over for the last 25 years.
So many toy kernels, so many ideas and tests and watching A's and B's and C's and D's flash on the screen. Memory dumps. Writing executable loaders. Poring over the Intel/AMD manuals (and later AARCH64). ACPI (ugh). Trying to implement the techniques from the latest papers (usually in an effort to maximize the performance of a microkernel-ish design).
It's all great fun of course, so I'm not lamenting that, but when you start to get to the userspace infrastructure, unless you're YOLO'ing it with libc and POSIX compatibility, everything is so opinionated, and there's SO MUCH TO BUILD, I just kind of peter out.
It's been about 18 months or so since I last had the itch, but it's inevitable that I'll do it all over again.
Best of luck!
gazook89
Immediately after the opening header there is a button to switch to English, fyi.
Jotalea
There actually is a Switch to English button at the top of the screen, which of course translates the whole website to English, and adds more details that I know English-speaking people would be interested on (for example, the source code), while Spanish-speakers won't. And even if they are, they have a note saying "for more details, check the English version of the site"; and I'm sure that if they can understand those details, they can also understand English.
> Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection?
No, not yet. I still have to learn that
> Do you ever jump to a user space context?
I mean, I haven't put any restrictions, just as I haven't put many features that I would consider user space.
> Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
I saw a video about TempleOS, and got motivated to make my own OS from scratch. Of course, TOS is a ~15 years-in-work project, while mine has been just a couple days/weeks, these are very far from each other.
I guess my final goal with it would be to get Minecraft running? I don't know, getting a Java program (or Java itself) to run on an OS from scratch sounds too complicated for me.
My current goal is to get Bad Apple on ASCII to show up on this, but to do that I need to save a lot of variables, one for each frame, and there being ~6000 frames, it would take a huge lot more than 512 bytes, so I would need to get jumps in memory to work so I can have these many variables set, which is what I would be working on now, if I hadn't other stuff to do.
> Best of luck!
Thanks :)
caspper69
Yeah, I didn't notice the site switch to English link; If I had seen it, I might have also seen the source, lol. Sorry about that.
Terry Davis, the author of TempleOS, was fairly well known online. He had a lot of struggles psychologically, and met an unfortunate end a few years ago. It's an interesting case, but I honestly wouldn't take too much from the project. He was a gifted developer, but he did things for reasons that were decidedly non-technical.
For building up your knowledge (you can't only read the reference manuals, after all), there's a ton of resources online, but a particularly good one is the OSDev wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page. I can't speak for it as it exists today because I've been out of the game for too long, but it was maintained by helpful folks. I didn't check to see if the forums are still up, but there used to be a wealth of information in them back in the day too.
As a note, relying on BIOS is ok, but the whole write a bootsector in 512 bytes to switch to 386 protected mode, to then switch to long mode (64-bit) is kind of outdated (the modern computer boot process is handled by the UEFI firmware, and by the time your OS binary is loaded, the CPU is already in long mode with paging enabled and setup with a flat linear mapping of physical memory).
Not to say that the method/approach is worthless (it's all learning), it's just that you spend an awful lot of time doing things in the whole mode-switching dance that are basically tossed in the bin almost immediately, and most of it has nothing at all to do with OS development. UEFI at least allows you to start on the real meat & potatoes without spinning your wheels on code that isn't going to stick around very long.
I've wanted to make my own OS since I started programming. Now, 5 years later, I did it (kind of).
Sure, it is really basic, has very little functionality, but I made it and I'm proud of that. Oh, and I'm just 16 btw.