Comment by samwilliams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samwilliams | Hacker News Reader

As someone that has just spent the last 27 months building an OS from scratch in a University research environment (an OS that can survive catastrophic hardware and software failure [0]), I am very impressed with the quality of this document. I only wish I had found it previously!

OS dev can be great fun and gives you a level of understanding about how computers actually work that is hard to gain from other sources. I have frequently found myself using the knowledge I gained from building the OS when working on other projects. It has been particularly useful when it comes to understanding performance issues. I would highly recommend it to anyone that is even remotely interested.

Other superb resources to help you get started include the OSdev wiki[1], along with this document[2] from the University of Birmingham, UK.

[0] http://www.hydros-project.org

[1] http://wiki.osdev.org/

[2] https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exr/lectures/opsys/10_11/lectures...

Your research project sounds interesting. Is there any info you can share (white paper, etc)?

Thanks! At the moment, the best source of information is the talk I gave at the Erlang User Conference 2016 [0]. Four papers and a thesis are in the pipeline for next year, though! I will update the site once PDFs of those are available.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XqHiumZ02E

Thanks for sharing, really enjoyed the video. Isn't it amazing that Ericsson were achieving nine 9's (31.5 milliseconds downtime per year) [1], using Erlang in the AXD switch back in 1998 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...

What is your opinion on some of the issues? I see the project seems dead, and some of the simple issues like fixing the frame buffer instructions, and replacing external with extern. I'd love to get into OS dev, and help make this 'book' better, but it seems dead and no one has taken the time to fix such issues

Do you mean with the 'little book of OS dev'? Or one of the other resources?

In general, my experience has been that OS dev is a topic that is best approached through the study of a variety of different documents, simultaneously. For example, you would do well to read both the originally posted 'little book...', as well as the University of Birmingham text. Then it might be a good idea to look at the OSdev wiki pages for the specific tasks that you want to work on.

> but it seems dead and no one has taken the time to fix such issues

Unfortunately, there seem to be few /completed/, and high-quality texts available. It is certainly a shame that there is not a modern, high-quality book about OS development (that I know of), but the motivated student can certainly find the needed information. Good luck and have fun!

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