OSDev.org

I just wanted to say hi, I've been reading here a lot.

I started making my own OS for fun, (Thanks for the help JamesM! and others of course), and wanted to mention that I hate and love every step. Not one thing has been easy even when I expected it to be.

What I have...
Higher half microkernel, preemptive multithreading, paging (No virtual memory yet), initrd, elf loading, IPC, pci driver, Newlib ported, bochs test bed.

After all of that, now I get to learn about ext2 so I can actually read a file. Once that is done then I can load and run any statically linked exe I made with my version of NewLib. I keep wanting to do this or that, but keep getting stuck by the next hurdle.

However, I have learned that going with a microkernel architecture lets me use standard C and libc calls for servers. No need to remember my kernel specific malloc and free. I can finally revert to just writing what I know and it goes much easier.

I just wanted to thank everyone for having this forum here and being so helpful to everyone.

give us a link, please

I fixed your topic title (What I hate -> have)

Sorry, no link as of yet. I spend all my time making it better. Once I have a shell and some basic FS utilities I want to put up some kind of site.

Anyone else working with a microkernel type system? It seems both easier and harder at the same time. Easy to build services and hard to figure out all the IPC and how to not make it slow down or break because of it.

lhc wrote:Easy to build services and hard to figure out all the IPC and how to not make it slow down or break because of it.

Yes, I think IPC is one of the most important thing in microkernels. Work to make it really accurate and fast, and your microkernel will grow better

After about 2 weeks on a misunderstanding of my disk image, I finally have started reading files/directories with ext2.

Next to load a HelloWorld program from the disk image, fork a new process and run it. Should be easy since I already have that working from initrd for my HD driver and ext2 driver.

IPC is kind of bad, but I just wanted to proof of concept it before I went too far.

Its kind of fun now that I'm past having trouble booting anything. Its fairly stable too.

I also recently found out about a program, qemu. Much easier and faster for me to use for a VM instead of Bochs.