The little book about OS development

Did you use a book or similar resource? I vaguely recall there was some book about implementing an OS in Rust.

Without knowing much about the type of OS this book is, I imagine that there a lot of architectural aspects of x86 are considered "standard" to many of the x86 OSes out there. I hear a lot about code density in the x86, MIPS, and SH-2, compared to a lightweight RISC processor. Or, the book glazes over some of the more universal aspects of OSes, to address specific features of x86.

It would be great if there were more hobby OS resources targetting something other than X86. It is common and everything, but all the bootstrapping and device cruft involved isn't something you should need to get in your head, and 386 assembly by itself is terribly frustrating and obtuse to write by hand. I think most people might be better off starting out with a RISC microcontroller. There isn't nearly as much bullshit involved between getting a running kernel and talking some simple serial, and you can get an instruction set reference, assembler manual, and processor datasheet that will tell you everything you need to know. And it's easy to have fun hardware hacking that way too, making your own peripherals and such.

True. I'm guessing it's the same reason that lexing and parsing are the focus of many langdev guides, despite being amongst the smallest/simplest parts of the compiler. I guess it makes sense, since those topics are the entry point into the field and at some point your learning is mostly self-directed.

I wonder if I could learn anything interesting by making a user space machine agnostic os using some VM like wasm that allows for preemption

People talk in hushed and revenant tones of SICP despite it having little to do with modern computing architecture. Perhaps x86 is still a great way to cut one's teeth.

Ahh my favorite professor and favorite class at UW. Remzi is great.

just got recommended this and read a good chunk of it! it’s a great read

Writing my own "OS" (read: mostly copying from the OG Bran's Kernel Development Tutorial [1]) was also a formative experience for me as a teenager. Really great way to learn systems programming and what goes on under the hood!

[1] http://www.osdever.net/bkerndev/Docs/gettingstarted.htm

Same! Implementing an OS as a toddler had a profound impact on me. I got as far as needing an SSL implementation and then realized I should probably go get my parents.

Ha! Same. Lost the code too. It was fun actually booting something into bare metal. This book helped a lot:

https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd...

There is an active fork here: https://ordoflammae.github.io/littleosbook/

Fusion author here. I haven't abandoned the project, and I do plan to complete it, including a graphics subsystem and a network stack. I'm currently trying to crack a tough nut, which is efficient zero-copy IPC using message passing over channels with a shared heap. This is a fundamental piece that will be used to communicate between different components (both within the kernel and across kernel-user space). Once I have a proper implementation, I expect the pace to pick up.

And of course I will document everything as I make more progress.

I have thought about making a game or a Fallout 3/4 mod in which the player needs to assembly pieces to repair a broken vintage computer before the nuclear war, and then search for some manuals and write programs to solve quests.