With my housemate being a software engineer (programming low level code for PLCs/micro controllers), he got me interested in some of the more direct hardware programming. Before then, I did a fair amount of game programming, never really finishing any large games, but that was never my goal. I was actually more interested in creating game libraries and toolkits.
This frame of mind naturally lead me into the realm of Kernel/OS design (the ultimate, and lowest level library/toolkit). I had ventured briefly into the field at college, so was already up to speed on the technical terms. I began by following Brandon's excellent tutorial, but after playing around with the results a bit, I decided it would be silly to continue with that code base, because it's not mine! I then restarted my project, using some of my own ideas. This is where my fixation on the Intel manuals started. If there were something I didn't quite understand, I'd come to these forums; never needing to post, because all of the questions I had, were answered many times already.
I restarted my OS another couple of times after that, due to looking at my code and wondering why I did something. This was over the space of about 2 years on and off. The project never had any goals apart from obtaining knowledge, and by trying so many different things, I accomplished that pretty well.
My Kernel, at the moment, has all the basics: idt, gdt, isr, irq, paging, the beginnings of a libc, heap manager, multi-threading, pit driver, console driver, vfs, initrd/ramfs, some other stuff and a bunch of ideas about how to implement a nice console-based experience.
I'm spending most of my spare time on this, and now I think it's about time I started a project with a few more goals. I'm very open to ideas, but here are some of the things I would certainly prefer about the project:
- Open Source
- At least partial POSIX compliance would be nice. Mainly because I don't fancy writing my own compiler/assembler, so the easier it is to port one, the better (then again, depends on the other goals/ideas).
- Open Source
- An interesting idea. Something new. Something fun.
- Free
- My language of choice is C, though I'm also growing to like Assembly, I'm still thinking in C.
I'm actually looking for someone who is perhaps in the same mindset, or is just restarting their OS project themselves and has an idea or two. Obviously I'm not after someone who's just started OS Dev, or just started programming (what are you doing here?
), but I'm also not looking for Linus.If you have any questions, or are interested in teaming up, please do reply
.Thanks for reading,
Phill
The reason I didn't ask someone to join mine, is that, after looking around everyone who wants to have someone join their OS has nothing done! Nobody wants to join something like that, nobody does. 
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