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Does anyone have a small, basic x86 kernel with multitasking, a memory manager, and paging that they wouldn't mind me forking just to play around with? Every time I've tried to write a kernel it ends with me giving up around multitasking or paging. I'd really like to skip ahead to the interesting parts but it's hard to do that when you can't get past the boring parts

i hate to break it to you, but those are fairly easy (and interesting) compared to some of the stuff you will no doubt want to try after that.

gui?? its a mission.

lukem_95 wrote:those are fairly easy (and interesting) compared to some of the stuff you will no doubt want to try after that.

IMO GUIs are much more interesting than twiddling bits in a control register. (Also, if you screw up you might get a cool pattern rather than a panic or reset. Fun

As always with these "bah, i'm a failure, let me steal someone else's code" I'm starting to realize that I'm not a complete failure and that stealing code is bad. I really need to start thinking before I post

If you really want to do gui, start working on your graphic routines, when youll want to work on the technics of a kernel, youll already have your Quickdraw ready.

By order of difficulty:
paging
memory management
context switching
vm86

There are several tutorials (e.g. JamesM's tutorials) around for all of those things, they're pretty easy anyway as lukem said... If you consider them to be "boring" bits, maybe you shouldn't be OSDeving. Personally I find lower level things quite fun to work on.

Both the GUI and the internals are important, because they're part of the operating system. An operating system with a GUI will always be more attractive than one with a text console, but if you don't have the other parts or if you copy them from somewhere else, the GUI is pretty much useless. You shouldn't ignore anything. If you're thinking about your GUI, just write down all of your ideas for now and make some kind of little spec that you can use later. You could also write code if you want, but it won't be backed up by anything and I'm sure nobody will be interested in writing support for it.

mmiikkee12 wrote:Does anyone have a small, basic x86 kernel with multitasking, a memory manager, and paging that they wouldn't mind me forking just to play around with? Every time I've tried to write a kernel it ends with me giving up around multitasking or paging. I'd really like to skip ahead to the interesting parts but it's hard to do that when you can't get past the boring parts

Don't get me wrong but I would really suggest you to stick to your own source code. It's OK if you just want to fiddle around with other peoples source code. BUT if you really want to go ahead then you should know what you coded in the past so that you can take the full adsvantage.

Assume this, you get stuck somewhere , where you'll have to change the code in paging.c then, it will be very difficult for you to make changes to the previous code since it's nt written by you.

So my suggestion read read and read as much as you can and wite your own source code. I am not saying that you shouldn't reffer to other peoples source code but is saying if you do so then do gain the through knowledge of that part so that debugginbg can be made easy!