These things are way better to see than stupid AI. It’s not going to “sell”, but it’s a tech person being creative and doing their craft.
I used to study a lot of hobbyist OS development in my late teens. It was awesome, I still try doing small kernels from time to time (last one was a RISCV small kernel that printed a message to my partner).
It's weird to characterize ai categorically as "stupid" when, until it was wrapped with clever UX, it was an entirely academic pursuit (craft), with little to no money in it.
I did that all my life: no unicorns but if you do enough things, some will sell auto (once any traction happens I sell: I don't like running a company, I like building stuff). Without all this stress and grifting. Granted, I was lucky that my hobby in 2000 turned out to be worth millions, but it still works fine 25 years later.
This is great! What would you do differently if you started again today?
What are your thoughts on language suitability for the lower level parts (ie. Sticking to c or a simple subset of c++ or any of the newer languages)?
Given the myriad of resources available, how did you manage to keep the project engaging rather than copying others people code?
Thanks for the feedback! I think the biggest thing I’d do different is to have a plan. I just started out with the goal of doing the basic hello world OS, and that’s it. But then I kept adding new things, adding more and more working on multiple things at the same time. Which has lead to some technical debt I’m still trying to fix. I’d also try to be less UNIX dependent.
Regarding language, I love C for its basic syntax and “straight to the point” style. Maybe I’d consider some other languages for userspace applications.
A goal for me from the start was always that I wanted to write everything myself, no porting of any software, and for me that’s the entire point of the project. I mostly adhered to the rule of copy ideas not code.
Regarding a plan, I often feel the same way about my own project. There are a number of systems I've rewritten multiple times, and I can't help but think much of that would have been unnecessary if I had been more tedious about diagramming out my needs and requirements beforehand. Other times I wonder if I would have gotten this far had I planned things out... It's the age old question of "would I have started this project if I had known how much time and effort it would have taken?"
Each approach has a clear set of pros and cons, as others have explored in this thread. In the end, I think what ultimately matters is whether we're satisfied (and proud) of a project after a significant amount of progress has been made.
I also took the "I want to write everything myself" approach with my project since I wanted it to be a demonstration of my abilities. I wanted to prove to myself and others I could create a project of significant size and scope. It seems like this often means working without libraries and having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. It's tedious, but it certainly adds to the satisfaction you get as you look over your work and think "this is truly mine; I did this."
And yes, copy ideas, not code, is one of those things I do my best to adhere to. Sometimes, at least with JS, you run into problems, look into solutions, and it turns out there's really only one sensible way to do something; what you end up writing feels like a boilerplate solution to the problem. I often find myself going back and forth through search results from places like Stack Overflow and trying to siphon out the best techniques and ideas from multiple examples to mesh together into some usable code in a style I prefer.
Finally, since I failed to say this eariler, congrats on your project! I'm gonna have to try it out as soon as I get some extra time.
I'm not sure it's a bad thing to not necessarily have a plan. Intuition is the hidden sister of logic, both children of reason, and we don't always see her because she's often behind the scenes doing all the work.
Technical debt is as sure as death and taxes. Good software grows over time, like a person growing up. Sometimes you have parts that are needed for a time but not permanently, like baby teeth. That's what technical debt is like.
Other times there are parts that are absolutely ideal long term, but it's a long time before they even make sense. And sometimes things only develop much later than we expect, like wisdom teeth. These are software features that won't make sense until you write the thing that you don't realize yet is only temporary.
I have the same goal of writing everything myself from scratch. It's a very important goal to me for a reason I don't fully understand yet.
Congrats on writing an entire OS, and getting it booting on real hardware! That must be such a rewarding feeling in its own right, even if no one understood how. And it looks so very cool.
You've given me more motivation to announce my project soon. Maybe next week. Thanks.
Have you played around with Zig yet? I hear that would be a good replacement for C here. Did you have any thoughts on porting your OS to that, or did you have any branches some Zig code made its way into?
I’d love to hear about you project! Seeing what other people make is a big inspiration. I have not tried Zig, for the kernel I don’t think anything will beat C for me personally. But for userspace applications I’d love to try it!
Curious about the less UNIX dependent part - did you find the UNIX model (everything is a file - or more accurately everything is a serial connection) to be a poor abstraction for a hobby OS?
Oh, I really like UNIXes abstractions and use alot of them in my OS. What I meant was, because I use GCC for compiling, ld for linking, ar for archives etc, I noticed that I got really bound to the C way of UNIX. Or maybe POXIS would be more appropriate. It did “force” me into some design decisions which I did not like. Or even just the way I wrote C is so UNIX / Linux like. Wish I tried to branch out more, especially considering how different Windows C is.
I think the default system font should be a more condensed variant; it would make the system look much more refined. There are a number of areas where it's clear you need more horizontal space for characters. Each character should have less width, and there should be as little space between the characters as possible - just a single pixel ought to be enough at the font size and resolution you're using.
I don't know anything about your font system; I'm assuming it's fixed width bitmap fonts? I don't know how hard it would be to make these changes within your codebase so if it's too much work then don't worry about it.
I've been building a web OS site from scratch for a while now (not as technically impressive as what you're doing) and I just got through a total rewrite of the font classes, so it's at the top of my mind.
I agree my current font is very sub optimal. It’s basically still the original font I got working when I started out. I have looked into rendering proper fonts, so it’s on my todo list. Just have been neglecting it.
I had the same problem, I made a 3x4 font that was just barely servicable for the initial project to show text on screen. It was my first (and only) font I ever made! Eventually I needed lower-case, so I turned those into lower-case and made a 3x5 variant for uppercase. It's still not ideal, and I'm sure when I announce my project, people will complain about it. So I've prepared to say "it's a stop-gap solution to make the OS servicable, but we can make more fonts."
I think people skimming a project often just don't quite get how much we pour into our projects, and how very much it cost us. But it's okay, they don't have to understand just how cool it is what we made. At least we know.
When I saw your video of your project, I was thinking to myself, "wow, that's incredibly cool, and I can relate to the steps he's doing!" Just trying to be the voice here of someone who thought that way, in case there are no others.
One answer to that is to ensure that you accept plugged-in font files via some well-known format like FreeBSD's "vt" font file format, BDF, or GNU UniFont's HEX format; and then just let people get on with picking their own fonts. (-:
If you want a quick improvement over that 8by8 IBM ROM font, I suggest two things:
1. Switch to a 16by16 square.
2. For the ASCII range, go with one of the old home computer fonts, rather than IBM ROMs. Viznut has .hex files for Commodore PET and BBC Micro graphics modes squirrelled away inside Unscii.
I've done the work of upscaling the 8by8 PET font to 16by16, and it works quite nicely as a monospace square font. These old home computer fonts were of course designed to. Whereas in the world of VGA you're soon in trouble with glyphs designed for 9by16.
The 8x16 font from the Atari ST's hi-res mode is pretty slick if you like something bold and a little futuristic.
https://github.com/ntwk/atarist-font (or rip it directly from the ROM)
Supporting variable-width fonts is pretty easy on its own (if bit-packing, you might wish to store them vertically), but does complicate combining characters (remember, they go in different places and may need to make the new character larger).
For vector fonts, the interesting question is "if I render this at a different resolution and then scale it, will it line up?" which fundamentally has no answer that can satisfy everyone. Most other difficulties are merely a Small Matter of Coding (and providing appropriate APIs).
The fact that the OP built an entire hobby OS complete enough to have windowing and font rendering, and got it booting off his vintage notebook, is extremely impressive, and much more so than the ChatGPT frontends and Chrome reskins that HN usually enthusiastically updoots.
Yeah I thought as much. Sorry for the bad joke, it was not my intention to accuse or offend anyone. The discussion on fonts continued into cool technical areas like bitmapping!
My point was: I would not expect such a response anywhere else but HN :)
Someone in the crowd was already there and is wearing the t-shirt - that’s why I come here <3
Congrats! Looks great coming from someone who had a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977. I have been toying with KolibriOS and MenuetOSx64, but I would sure like to try rolling my own OS. You did it! Keep truckin'!
Just adding this comment to say congratulations and how impressed I am by your project! I've been an OS Dev fan since my teens and it feels great to see this achievement come to life. I am a little curious to know how the graphics subsystem is initialized. I wish you the best of success.
Hi, I'm in this field about decades and trying to learn OS development. I've an idea of FASM, NASM, FASM-G. But I need to study the output of assembler program. So I can understand how the OS is actually works in the binary level. Do you learned opcodes for the particular architecture? What did you for device driver programs? Can you please list out the steps to develop my own OS.
That is so awesome! I'd really like to see more people bringing back the spirit of early computing with much more tinkering at the computer rather than app level.
I've been thinking about doing a long term hobby project of creating a personal computer - one where I create the entire software stack myself and can know the provenance of every bit that goes into the system (though I can't do the same with the hardware, unless I can get enough performance out of an FPGA to run everything on it).
Until now it seemed unrealistic but you proved it's possible! And looks like you're even implementing a hobby C compiler: https://github.com/joexbayer/C-Compiler
Thanks! Yes, knowing that you’ve written everything from high up in userspace down to the drivers is a great feeling! But also a debugging hell…
The C compiler is built for the OS, and works inside it. The project became just so big that I wanted to take it out of the OS repo. Especially because it works on Linux too.
Could you elaborate on how this compiler interacts with the operating system? Specifically, how does it handle features like structs, and what are the current limitations or planned enhancements in this area?
There is no magic interaction between the compiler and OS. It simples compiles to the same machine code (i386) and uses interrupts for system calls. Structs are handled as a memory region with a size based on its members, and the member access is simply an offset into that region.
Current it has lots of limitations such as only int and char, no switch statements etc. The biggest change from default C, is allowing functions in structs and implicit passing a struct to a function if it’s a struct function. You can read more here:
Looks great! I wanted to try it on my old 2010 computer but I can't find it anymore... these days things are always getting rid of old stuff, keep it up!
While I share the sentiment (and have been noodling with similar projects), unfortunately the minimum is around 4 seconds as the VideoCore chip is what boots first, then after about 4 seconds hands things over to the ARM chip, which can effectively boot instantly with this sort of OS.
It's interesting that a few of these projects seem to be reaching milestones at the same time. It's reassuring to see that there are people out there who are still working on this deep of a level with computers and sharing their results with us.
I'd love to see more of this - eventually there will be some new OS concept, as opposed to everything just being a rehash of the same old ideas from the 1970s. (For reference, the VAX 11/780 was announced in 1977, and we run on fundamentally the same model of hardware today. Nothing particularly exciting or different than VMS or UNIX is being used in today's operating systems.)
An example of a radically different way to think is TempleOS.
I have an old eee pc myself! Tested it on that one too, performance is alright, not really optimized but since it’s so “basic” compared to real OSes it should be quite fast. Bigger problems are bugs and lack of functionality for real hardware. (Userspace applications are only available on the QEMU images.
Out of curiosity, why can’t you spare time? I’d be pretty lost without my hobby projects (one of them was a toy OS, but that stopped when low level OS development became my actual job), ever since I was a kid.
Oh I doubt that, probably will never be even close. But, it was never the goal to create a “real” product. Just a hobby project for myself to tinker with.
Congrats on hitting the milestone! This is exactly the kind of work I want to see on HN: passion projects just for the sake of making something, not advertisements, market news, or AI bullshit.
Oh man I wish such big accomplishments were documented on video like Andreas Kling did with SerenityOS https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling
.. learned a lot from his videos
Yeah… kinda wish that too in hindsight. I have screenshots of the entire development process from the very start, and of course my git history. Never thought I’d get this far.