lectricpharaoh

If you're really serious about this, stevenup7002, then I suggest you grab the source for one of the OSs out there for which the source is freely available. If you do some searching on the net, you'll probably be able to find a relatively simple OS (when compared to things like Windows and Linux). A quick search turned up this (I didn't download the sources, but then, I'm not trying to write an OS). If you can't make sense of it, you're not ready to write an OS.

If you are still wanting to write an OS, you'll need to know assembly. OS development is one of the areas where a knowledge of assembly is still necessary. You'll also need to learn the APIs for Windows, Linux, and MacOS if you intend to emulate them. For MacOS, you'll be doing more than emulating another OS; you'll need to emulate the Mac hardware as well (most specifically, the CPU, though there will be other elements as well).

I hope you understand now why some of us made fun of you. Writing an OS is not a trivial undertaking. You're not the first to post some bold thread about writing an OS, and the other people who did so got mocked, too. If you want to avoid that, write a bunch of the code, get it mostly working, and then show it to us.

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para

This is a little off topic, but I recently read about an interesting OS written by one guy that has full graphical support. He wrote it completely in assembly, and claims that was the only language that would allow him to write such a system and still fit on a 1.44MB floopy disk :eek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS
http://www.menuetos.net/screens.html

Relevant to the topic or not, I thought you guys might find it as interesting as I did.

nnxion

Yup Menuet OS is nice and Solar OS is also.

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para

Nice, thanks for the link.

Nebula

Minix is a good one to look at source code. It is done entirely in C as well.

http://www.minix3.org/doc/AppendixB.html <---- sorce

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Mad_guy

Could you please explain to me how exactly you're going to get Mac programs (which are all primarily PPC architectures right now,) Linux programs (which encompass a wide variety of formats and architectures), and Windows (PE files are primarily for x86 but Alpha ones exist as well,) to work together harmoniously. You're at least going to be narrowing out Windows files or Mac files - because the two just are't compatable (PPC and x86, Linux can go both ways.) THEN of course even if you did manage to work that shit out, you'd have to have some type of light abstraction (or heavy emulation) layer to make that kind of shit work on architectures in which they weren't originally compiled.

Let's also completely ignore the fact that, if you want this programs to work natively, you will have to somehow work out all the dynamic and static linking methods associated with all the programs. This means that your applications you want to work on the OS will have to have their own subsystems (such as how Windows has Win32 and POSIX subsystems) or something related in order to get each application to work well, because a linux ELF probably won't work on Windows or your OS unless you have the libraries to support it, you also, have to make sure these things don't clash.

And finally, if you're going to make an 'operating system which never crashes,' I assume you will be going for either:

* A Microkernel
* No loadable drivers (the bane of all stability when coming to kernels of any variety.)

Both have their problems - no drivers means basically no hardware support, and a Microkernel these days is WAY too slow because the drivers have to continuously communicate inbetween process spaces whenever they're called (which is about every time a process does something in a lot of systems.) Added onto that, the thought of a Microkernel is almost inherently flawed anyway. The general theory is that drivers and the kernel are loaded into two seperate spaces, so if a driver crashes then the kernel still stands and the system stays up as long as the kernel is stable. That is a good idea, but in reality, what if the driver that falls over like a bitch is your file system driver or the driver that might handle process and thread scheduling? It's pretty unlikely your operating system will be able to fully recover from something like that, so the kernel will have to deal with it, and it will probably be delt with via reboot. And if you go for a monolithic kernel (a la NT or Linux), well, the thought of never crashing is silly.

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nnxion

Given the power of computers nowadays, microkernels can be a good choice. Although some would argue that the overhead would be coming from the lowest level, which wouldn't be nice.

@OP: There are hundreds of open source OS's out there, take a look at a few and see what their goals are. There are some even on sourceforge, with pretty good ideas.

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stevenup7002

Just to set everything straight, I've already done the assembler portion, Grubed it, writen a few drivers. a basic core has been done.

Mad_guy

Microkernels could possibly be the next method for creation of operating systems, yes. However, like I said, the driver problem isn't solved by microkernels, what if one driver is made to interfere with another important one? What if that driver doesn't need any interference but falls anyway? It is very possible people may start going to the microkernel solution in the future, but given the current stability of the quite impressive NT kernel Microsoft has made (actually, NT is more like a hybrid Microkernel, but it doesn't stray too far away from standard Monoliths, more Mono than Micro I'd say), I'd say Monolithic systems are just doing fine. DragonflyBSD is the first non-Mach BSD system to adopt the Hybrid kernel solution. But hybrids are far from perfect (hybrid kernels are simply kernels where some of the code is stored in the kernel (such as drivers) to increase speed, but things like the NT executive are user mode, even though it's a crucial part of the system.)

An interesting modus operandi to solve the Kernel Driver conundrum actually, is the thought of "No kernel" systems. Definately cool. Check out the TUNES project or Unununium. I can't really comment on Exokernels.

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zorin

Hey. Being serious now, Ill rewrite your website because im bored and have finished all my projects for this year. PM me or post on this forum if you want it doing or not.