Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in The Little Book About OS Development.
This is not your typical dry academic textbook. It’s a hands-on, step-by-step guide aimed at hackers, tinkerers, and developers who want to demystify kernel programming. The book walks you through setting up your environment, bootstrapping your OS, handling interrupts, implementing virtual memory, and even tackling system calls and multitasking. It provides just enough detail to get you started but leaves room for exploration – because, let’s be honest, half the fun is in figuring things out yourself.
Completeness and structure are two things that make this book stand out. Other OS dev guides may give you snippets and leave you to assemble the puzzle yourself. This book documents the entire process, including common pitfalls. If you’ve ever been lost in the weeds of segmentation, paging, or serial I/O, this is the map you need. You can read it online or fetch it as a single 75-page long PDF.
Mockup photo source: Matthieu Dixte
Another good resource is the OSDev Wiki which has even more info and for more than just x86.
Sadly they too only touch that other CPU architectures might exist, would have loved more in-depth articles about developing an OS on retro platforms, they might be easier to handle for the bedroom coder.
Some old C64 or, if you want to go even older, a PDP-8 a mere person can understand, the IA-32/AMD64 platform you need to have studied and even then they are not for the faint of heart.
Shucks! I was hoping for an actual book printed on paper. Ah well, this is the digital age, I guess.
Kinda like the old days? Printed code that you can type in to make your own operating system?
😉
Yeah. Z80 or 6502 or 8086 code in a magazine. It’s is well known that I’m kind of old.
Or maybe a book with a CD-ROM.
Like this perhaps?
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/developing-your-own-32-bit-operating-systembook-and-cd-rom_richard-a-burgess/488125/
I’m about to run it on the dot matrix, if I can find the cable
It’s only 75 pages. Have FedEx print and bind it for you.
And if you actually follow, you’ll gain a deep understanding of what the book is trying to teach you.
And like with any other crap by O’Reilly you’ll learn bugger all.
Have you read it?
This has nothing to do with O’Reilly
Maybe next time actually look at what the article is about?
A book from 2015 that doesn’t even mentions EFI and only talks about BIOS surely needs to be updated.
^^^^^^^^^
This….
UEFI is an overengineered and bloated security nightmare. Projects like uboot are way more sensible. Updating BIOS specs would have been a good idea also.
pshaw
This has nothing to do with good or bad. Like it or not, PCs selling today are using EFI, and if you are not aware of it, your new OS will not get a chance to boot (unless you enable CSM).