Develop my own OS

09-05-11

            As I was starting to prepare for GATE, the first topic that I took up was Operating Systems. The text book that I am following is ‘Operating System Concepts’ by Silberschatz. Started reading the first chapter and got a firm grip on what an Operating system is, even though have been using one for the past 11 years. But still something was missing. It was purely theoretical and many of the concepts I had to visualize and be satisfied that it might be like this and that. Suddenly a thought came to my mind of developing an OS from scratch. Started Googling and found lots of resource on it. Decided to dive into the basics of Operating Systems and understand the concepts firmly. Hope my venture turns out to be a success.

The first site that caught my attention was the Bona Fide OS Developer site

http://www.osdever.net/

I have with me an HP Pavillion dv2000 laptop with Windows Vista installed on it.

I am going through the provided tutorial

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/view/getting-started-in-os-development

The definitions and stuff will be there in the tutorial I am following as I am trying to document whatever I did to learn OS Development. So if you find any term which you do not understand I urge you to Google and find more about it.

The first thing that needs to be done is to get an emulator so that you can try out and do experiments on it rather than the real system.

I downloaded BOSCHS emulator. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

The programming languages that you need to know are ASM assembly language and a high level language (C,C++,Pascal...). I chose C, since I knew something about it. I have no clue about ASM language. Let’s see where it goes.

Downloaded NASM from the following location and installed it.

http://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.09.08/

Installed Cygwin so that we can use gcc to compile our C Source code.

Now I have an emulator for testing, NASM compiler for assembly language and GCC for C compilation.