The little book about OS development

I love osdev. I don&#x27;t know what the end game is for me, but there&#x27;s something really cool about being able to just create... whatever I want. It all sort of clicked for me when I was able to get some basic x86 interrupts and syscalls working. Once you get the syscalls going, the world is your oyster!<p>Seriously, I would highly recommend tinkering around with a hobby OS. I used it as an opportunity to learn Rust and I got more than I bargained for. Now, I feel somewhat comfortable in Rust AND I can throw more double and triple faults than most people in the world.

Unfortunately this book has the classic fault of osdev tutorials: lots of talking about x86 minutiae, very little osdev. X86 minutiae is not osdev. It is a vanishingly small portion of what even a basic OS has to deal with.

My favorite OS book (less about development and more about how it works) is Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Free in HTML and PDF form but they sell a printed book as well. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.cs.wisc.edu&#x2F;~remzi&#x2F;OSTEP&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.cs.wisc.edu&#x2F;~remzi&#x2F;OSTEP&#x2F;</a>

Thank you! This looks like a great resource on the topic.<p>I wish I still had the source code for the “OS” I made as a teenager. I got as far as writing an MBR boot loader, switching to protected mode, displaying characters on the screen, and keyboard input. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a fun challenge.

Speaking of OS development, games make learning fun. I had the idea of making a game to teach operating systems while taking a journey through the history of computers. The player would play the part of the process scheduler and interrupt handler, starting on a single CPU system with very limited RAM, before growing to SMP systems then maybe getting to multi-system distributed computing platforms that we have today.

Since everyone is plugging their favourite alternatives, I am still a big fan of Project Oberon, it may be not fit for purpose on 2025 computing, however it is a tiny graphical based OS, written in a memory safe systems language, with enough content to learn about OS development.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectoberon.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectoberon.net&#x2F;</a>

There are two Japanese operating system development books I wish have English translations because they take you as far as getting a graphical environment with windows working [0], one of the books is even a 30-days challenge of sort [1].<p>Here is someone&#x27;s take on MikanOS [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uchan-nos&#x2F;mikanos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uchan-nos&#x2F;mikanos</a><p>And another one on 30-days Homemade OS [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kamaboko123&#x2F;30daysOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kamaboko123&#x2F;30daysOS</a><p>An attempt to translate &quot;30-days Homemade OS&quot; [1] to English but it didn&#x27;t get far <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;handmade-osdev&#x2F;os-in-30-days" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;handmade-osdev&#x2F;os-in-30-days</a><p>I do not know of any English book nor article that go this far, except Fusion but the graphical environment chapter is not done yet [2]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.jp&#x2F;dp&#x2F;4839975868" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.jp&#x2F;dp&#x2F;4839975868</a> - MikanOS<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.jp&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00IR1HYI0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.jp&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00IR1HYI0</a> - 30-days Homemade OS<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0xc0ffee.netlify.app&#x2F;osdev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0xc0ffee.netlify.app&#x2F;osdev&#x2F;</a> - Fusion, an OS made in Nim

The book is good. I wish they would look at the issues on GitHub, there are some things that need to be fixed. The last commit was 10 years ago.

This took me a nostalgic dive back to 2000&#x27;s when a website called planet-source-code.com was popular among the developer community. It had hundreds of mini operating systems written by members. Most of them were written in C&#x2F;C++ and Assembly for the bootloader, compiled using Mingw32, and booting from a regular Floppy disk.

Now, where&#x27;s the instruction manual for the little red OS book? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kylin_(operating_system)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kylin_(operating_system)</a>

A little (ha) bit of confusion with &quot;The Little ...&quot; series, with that title.