FYSOS: OS Development Series

[BenLunt]

The subscription that you pay for Amazon Unlimited goes into a fund which is used to pay the writers of the books that you read for "free". Amazon monitors how much of the book you actually read, and the writer is paid accordingly, so no one should feel guilty about reading books in this manner - it's a great way of assessing books properly without bad writers being paid a significant amount for their dismal work, while quality books receive full payment (if every page has been turned and kept open long enough to read its content). But yes - it's still advisable to buy copies of Ben's books on paper if you need to work from them a lot (I'm thinking of his USB book in particular) as it's a lot easier to work from those, while any extra pennies sent his way are always going to be small compensation for providing such a great service to a very narrow readership.

You are absolutely correct, and thank you for the kind words.

Ben

[Bowlslaw]

This book is FANTASTIC. I don’t even care that you use Windows; the information is x86 anyway, and there are plenty of resources to help with the details of switching.

But there aren’t resources that have so much excellent information, from the ground up, about how a computer works and how it relates to OSDev.

DEFINATELY buying, I am a huge fan already. I recommend this book to anyone!

[BenLunt]

This book is FANTASTIC. I don’t even care that you use Windows; the information is x86 anyway, and there are plenty of resources to help with the details of switching.

But there aren’t resources that have so much excellent information, from the ground up, about how a computer works and how it relates to OSDev.

DEFINATELY buying, I am a huge fan already. I recommend this book to anyone!

Thank you for the kind words.

Ben
- http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[DylanGTech]

I have the first book in your series. At first I overlooked it since it was (relatively) dated, but it's becoming a massive help! I'm hoping to add my own experience with newer concepts like UEFI, which could help me make something more modern. Thanks for creating this series! I look forward to learning more as things go forward

[BenLunt]

I have the first book in your series. At first I overlooked it since it was (relatively) dated, but it's becoming a massive help! I'm hoping to add my own experience with newer concepts like UEFI, which could help me make something more modern. Thanks for creating this series! I look forward to learning more as things go forward

I appreciate all the great words I get from everyone.

As always, if you (or anyone else here) have any questions, please feel free to create a new thread and we will see if we can answer them.

Thanks again,
Ben

[sydbarrett74]

Ben,

I was very impressed with the screenshots you posted. Quite an undertaking! Keep these books coming—they are well appreciated and very handy to people wanting to dip their toes into the OS development pool.

sydbarrett74

[BenLunt]

Ben,

I was very impressed with the screenshots you posted. Quite an undertaking! Keep these books coming—they are well appreciated and very handy to people wanting to dip their toes into the OS development pool.

sydbarrett74

Hi,

Thank you for the kind words. It has been quite a bit of work over the years, but it is an interesting hobby.

Just for your information, and the others that are interested, I am currently working on Audio devices.

Volume 4 already has information on the Sound Blaster, an outdated audio card that is actually now emulated by other cards in one way or another for Legacy support.

To add to the next issue of that volume, I have a working AC'97 driver that will play PCM data (Microsoft .WAV, .VOC, .AU, etc.) and have the start of an ES1370 (AudioPCI) and ES1371 driver for .MIDI files. The hardware part is not that difficult, it is the conversion functions. i.e.: If the audio formatted file is not PCM data (.WAV, etc), you have to convert it to the data format the codec desires, definitely the case with the ES1370 and its AK4531 codec, from what I have learned so far. (But an still investigating).

There are other audio devices I may attempt to learn and add. For example, QEMU (supposedly) supports a few more devices. I may look up the Intel HD Audio.

I have been doing a little work on the other volumes as well, especially Volume 1. I have been adding and detailing more information about UEFI, task switching, both software and hardware tasking, as well as other key hardware components to the core system.

I have been doing some work on Volume 7, the Network interface, but networking never really interested me. There are so many different protocols that must be supported even to simply copy a file from one machine to the other. Though don't worry, I have not given up on it. There are some great tools out to help learn about the protocols used. I currently use Ethereal, which is an early version of https://www.wireshark.org/. However, since the new version (WireShark) requires a Windows version above XP, I stick with Ethereal. i.e.: I won't touch any Windows platform above WinXP.

Anyway, thank you for the kind words. I do appreciate them.

Ben
- http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[BenLunt]

Hi everyone,

First let me state that I have really enjoyed this hobby of mine. Learning as I go, writing these books has been a great joy for me, as well the the support from you, my readers. Thank you so much.

However, I have recently found that I don't have the time or desire to work on this hobby as much as I use to. For the time being anyway. I recently became a grandfather, which is a great great joy in itself, as well as have new, much better employment. I just don't have the time or desire to sit here and work on this hobby. (Again, for the time being.)

Therefore, I am announcing that I have released the ISO CD-ROM disc images for all currently available volumes, freely available, whether you have purchased the volume or not. This is my contribution to your hobby and my thank you for your support.

Please visit the Book Series home page and then each volume's page for instructions on getting this ISO image.

Hopefully I will be able to get back to this fine hobby in the very near future.

I do plan to visit this forum frequently and hopefully have time to answer questions, though please do not expect them to be prompt.

Also, please don't be disappointed. I do still have plans to continue my work and release updated editions. Just not at the moment.

Thank you to all of you here for your support. This is an enjoyable hobby that I hope to keep.

Thank you,
Ben
- http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[~]

It will be good to discuss the sources to help develop more reusables that people can understand.

[thomtl]

IMO The sources are pretty well documented so thats pretty unnecesary, however the only thing that might need a little more attention while using the is the use of a DPMI but that should be easy enough to understand. However as far as I know the code isn't meant to be copy paste but a resource to add to the books Ben wrote, but that doesn't mean that they aren't a valuable resource.

[Bowlslaw]

I am having a little trouble setting up my system so that I can test if the code works. I recently purchased the Kindle version of Volume 1.

I downloaded FreeDOS 1.2 .iso image from their website. I created a working Virtualbox installation with the image. I closed the VM and then mounted it in Windows 10. I used the Windows 10 'cmd' to XCOPY to my mounted FreeDOS image. Then, I ran the FreeDOS VM again and saw that I had the C:\FYSOS\MAIN\SYSCORE directory set up with all of the files inside.

After I did this, I tried running the commands in Chapter 10 to see if the code works. When I try to run BXIMAGE.EXE, I get: This program can not be run in DOS mode.

How do I set up a test environment for this? I can't seem to get anything to work to even test.

Thank you.

[BenLunt]

I am having a little trouble setting up my system so that I can test if the code works. I recently purchased the Kindle version of Volume 1.

I downloaded FreeDOS 1.2 .iso image from their website. I created a working Virtualbox installation with the image. I closed the VM and then mounted it in Windows 10. I used the Windows 10 'cmd' to XCOPY to my mounted FreeDOS image. Then, I ran the FreeDOS VM again and saw that I had the C:\FYSOS\MAIN\SYSCORE directory set up with all of the files inside.

After I did this, I tried running the commands in Chapter 10 to see if the code works. When I try to run BXIMAGE.EXE, I get: This program can not be run in DOS mode.

How do I set up a test environment for this? I can't seem to get anything to work to even test.

Thank you.

Hi,

You have seemed to find the only one that won't run in a TRUE DOS environment. :-) However, this is intended. BXIMAGE.EXE is in the BOCHS folder which contains the Bochs executables for Windows. I.e.: All of the files within the BOCHS folder are for a Windows environment.

The utilities in the UTILS folder, more than a dozen utilities, all run in a TRUE DOS environment. Some, however, do require the DMPI extender, which is included in that same folder. Instructions are in Appendix B. In fact, Appendix B shows how to use all of the utilities and includes instructions about this DMPI.

Please have a look at Appendix B.

Thank you so much for your comments. Please let me know if you have any more. However, it would probably be better if you emailed them to me, or private message via this forum since they may not be applicable to this forum.

Thank you,
Ben
- http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[ajxs]

I purchased a paper copy of the first book in the series recently. It's really been a great resource.
Thank you for all your effort in writing the series!

[BenLunt]

I purchased a paper copy of the first book in the series recently. It's really been a great resource.
Thank you for all your effort in writing the series!

Thank you for your kind words.

I have recently been working on my own project and have successfully booted via a 64-bit UEFI and a mostly working kernel. It is almost to what the 32-bit version is though this runs on a 64-bit machine in long mode. Recently, after working on my Ultimate project, I decided to see if I can get it to boot on a legacy 64-bit machine. i.e.: No UEFI. After building a 64-bit loader to load everything, I can't quite get it to work.

I have paging identity-mapped, A20 line on, 4k pages, you name it, a very basic loader. However, when running the kernel, I get some errors. Running the exact same kernel via a UEFI loader, the kernel runs as expected. Somewhere, somehow, I am not initializing something before moving to the kernel from the legacy loader. I can't figure it out at the moment.

I have verified that the kernel is loaded correctly, I have identity mapped the paging, a20 line is on, 4k pages (as apposed to 2meg or 4meg pages), everything I can think of. Some how my UEFI loader is doing something that my legacy loader is not, or visa-versa, and the kernel doesn't like the legacy boot.

Oh well, I will figure it out sooner or later.

Merry Christmas to all.

Edit a day later:
Come to find out, there were two things wrong and each had to do with the ACPI:
- First, I mistakenly used a pointer declaration for a 32-bit field. Therefore, when moving to 64-bit, this field now became 64-bits in size instead of staying at 32-bits.
- Second, for some reason, QEMU (using ACPI v1.0) places a value of one (1) in the FADT's x_dsdt field. I was checking for NOT NULL.
Neither of these errors were shown in the EFI bootable version since it uses ACPI 2.0+ which uses 64-bit fields and has a valid FADT x_dsdt field. :-)

Ben
- http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[BenLunt]

Hello all,

It has been quite a while since I have more than skimmed through a few posts on this forum. I just have had different interests at the moment.

There has been a lot of requests for the PDF version of my books, mainly due to the fact that the printed versions are not available in a lot of regions, or it would cost a fortune to ship to a certain region. Therefore, I have decided to give it a try.

If you are interested in the PDF version, please see this page.

Please note that I do this to be able to allow anyone with an email address to read my work, which should allow almost any region of this great planet we live on. So with this in mind, please bear with me with the process I have created to do so.

As for this hobby we all have, I still wish to return when time and interest allows. Thank you all for your support and the kind words, especially in personal emails, I have received over the years.

Ben