Noobs and hacking

[Bemk]

No, I started this project, more or less 2 months ago.

I started programming at my eleventh.

[Bemk]

Anyway, my grandson is kind of like that, but he is more mechanically/aeronautically inclined, but with a real genius for hands-on electronics hacking. He has more flying frankentoys than I can fathom. He attached a remote-controlled video camera to a model airplane that he built from bits and pieces and then sent me the video it produced, from takeoff to 20 minutes airtime to landing, even zooming in on himself at the controls! I sent him my old Dell D600 laptop with edubuntu installed for his birthday a year and a half ago with two hard drives - one with XP the other with edubuntu 8.04 (Ubuntu w/ lots of educational software). He was running XP to do his aircraft design and modeling when he let the smoke out by spilling a soda on the keyboard. Fortunately, it only toasted the XP hard drive, so he switched in the Linux drive and has never looked back.

Anyhoo, I don't think he'll be building operating systems, but he may well get into device drivers over time for stuff he builds.

Device drivers are also part of OS's

[Rubberman]

No, I started this project, more or less 2 months ago.

I started programming at my eleventh.

Oh. I misunderstood. I thought you'd already done the 6 years learning! Still, it's a notable aspiration. There are some good books on operating system design out there. I've always been more interested in database theory and design so while I have gotten into the internals of operating systems out of necessity it has never been my main interest. FWIW, I think that Linus Torvalds started from Andrew Tanenbaum's book on the design of Minix when he decided to build his own OS. That was less than 20 years ago, and look what he has wrought! Unfortunately, there are times when I REALLY wish Linus also adopted the micro kernel architecture that Tanenbaum was proposing for Minix. Wikipedia has a very informative article on it: MINIX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Bemk]

Oh. I misunderstood. I thought you'd already done the 6 years learning! Still, it's a notable aspiration. There are some good books on operating system design out there. I've always been more interested in database theory and design so while I have gotten into the internals of operating systems out of necessity it has never been my main interest. FWIW, I think that Linus Torvalds started from Andrew Tanenbaum's book on the design of Minix when he decided to build his own OS. That was less than 20 years ago, and look what he has wrought! Unfortunately, there are times when I REALLY wish Linus also adopted the micro kernel architecture that Tanenbaum was proposing for Minix. Wikipedia has a very informative article on it: MINIX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Please note that at that time Linus was an university student, with a good idea of how the x86 CPU architecture was working. I don't say his first version was the best at that time, but he certainly was older than I am now, and had more knowledge than I do now.

I am looking at all of the possibilities, and I am starting to get a feeling, though, I still don't even fully understand the 8086, so until I understand that, I won't be giving the 80386 a look. Once I can look at the 80386 I can gradually move up the ladder, until I reach the 80686, and then design my OS (which will be minimalistic, but should use the full 80686 capabilities) and only then I will be looking into the AMD64 port.

That's one thing I have clear. Now I need to look into all the individual features of the CPUs and the other relevant hardware (not liking the view at the graphics cards already, so lets start with basic VGA).

I also have a feeling of what the system should be looking like on kernel design level, and still haven't got a clue of how the user will be interacting with the system (if that is considered important ).

I have a friend who has more time he can dedicate to OS building, and he is designing the system as he is writing it. Not the best approach I'd say, but it seems to work. He already has the system in PM and using the timer interrupt every second to display a message.

My design will probably be a simple bash like shell, in user space, not kernel space
as my friend is doing. He will let the shell like environment evolve into a graphical one, while to me, those two are completely different projects. I will also try to make things minimalistic(other word for boring). Hoping I can do that.

By the way, I knew of Minix, and its history with Linux. I also know Tannenbaum teaches at a university in our capital city, Amsterdam. I guess that would make it quite easy to contact him if necessary ...

But why do I get the feeling I am drifting of topic ???

[Rubberman]

The nice thing about this forum (The Coffee Lounge) is that nothing is off-topic.

[gerard4143]

The nice thing about this forum (The Coffee Lounge) is that nothing is off-topic.

Really...I can remember two topics shut down in recent memory...

[Rubberman]

Really...I can remember two topics shut down in recent memory...

Ok. I suppose a thread that gets too rambling and has too many off-the-wall posts could get nuked. Such is life when humankind is involved...