OSDev.org

Hi

This is my first post on mega-tokyo, though I have been reading this forum and the FAQ for quite long as they are really helpfull.

As you may already guessed, I am working on my own OS. I would really like to code for a PowerPC platform with fixed hardware, but meanwhile I am using standard x86 hardware as it is easier to get, though it is quite hard to program on it.

For now I have been able to create the usual pieces of code one can think of when looking at the PC standard : an x86 kernel, an ATA driver, a floppy driver, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, a VGA driver in 640?480?16 (sic)...

That's ok for now, but now I would like to add more features like supporting an Ethernet device, supporting a modern GFX device, supporting sound... but unfortunately that's not in the PC standard so the only opportunity for me is to choose specific hardware, to pray for the vendor to provide public documentation, and write the driver.

Spending all your time writing drivers for your OS is one of the scary things you have to face when writing for the PC plateform. Well at least it does this to me. I was used to coding on the Amiga where all the Amigas you could find had more or less the same hardware.

Ok, so here the point : I plan to buy a new PC and I would like to choose popular hardware but hardware you can find documentation about it. If you are currently coding for the PC platform aswell, how did you choose the hardware you wanted to support ?

--> For the GFX card, unfortunately ATI and nVidia, the most two popular GFX vendors, do not seem to play the open source/documentation game. I used to love nVidia when I was coding 3D graphics but now I have a different point of view. I think I will choose one of the Intel chips they recently released open source drivers for. What GFX card are your mostly coding for ?

--> For the sound I have no idea what device I should use. What are the most popular ones ? What are the ones you are supporting in your OS ? Maybe an AC97 compatible sound chip ?

--> For the Ethernet device, damn, it looks that every computer related company make their own Ethernet device. I really don't know which one I should buy and code for. What have been your choice ?

Thank you for your reading, I hope I will get some clues here

(argh. i cannot remind of that library that provide 2D hardware acceleration for nvidia cards. it must be somewhere on the FAQ).

the only 'open' 3D hardware we have (afaik) is the intel chipset. If you can find that, you're lucky. VBE can also give you non-accelerated framebuffer with any resolution (almost) on any card, hopefully enough.

As for sound, yes, AC'97 is pretty standard and you can safely live with a hobby OS that says "install an AC'97 compatible card or write your own driver".

For the Ethernet drivers, you should be able to find NE2000 or RTL8139 compatible cards virtually any where for a handful of EUR/USD. They're cheap, they have open documentation, and they're widespread.

I would say that graphics are the biggest problem facing hobby OS Dev's, as most people want there eyecandy.
I would advice any one starting to think about OS Deving to look to wards, other processors eg: ARM.
As offering better prospect's for all your work, take the the AC97 as a example, this sounds like a ideal solution, but you still need about 10 or so drives as each vendor implements it differently .

Thank you for your replies I'm going to investigate in the motherboards field now...

Dex wrote: I would advice any one starting to think about OS Deving to look to wards, other processors eg: ARM.

I'm thinking about that too...
What about PegasosPPC? I think the problem of the hardware diversity exists there, however, but at least it's a more modern architecture...

JJ