OSDev.org

I recently came across a pdf that one of the developers of the KOS project wrote about testing and debugging their OS. The pdf can be found at http://kos.enix.org/~d2/snapshots/kos_c ... tingen.pdf. I've always used writes to 0xb8000 for debugging but that leads to a certain about of frustration when your code is triple faulting. In the pdf they talk about using the serial port for debugging. The best thing is that this seems to work well under virtual machines and real computers.

*gazes
wow I just found a nifty FREE serial port emulator!
it has a horrible front end(well there isn't one except for regedit)
http://com0com.sourceforge.net/
its may be a bit confusing for non-power-users to setup but it does its job well

to get it working in VPC you will have to follow their instructions on how to change the port names to COMx where x is an unused number