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The little book about OS development (2012) [pdf] (littleosbook.github.io)
224 points by StylifyYourBlog on Jan 10, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



One of the authors here, if you any questions, feel free to ask!

Me and Adam, https://github.com/tgwizard, wrote the book based on our experiences writing aenix, https://github.com/helino/aenix. If you find any issues with the text, please file an issue or open a PR at https://github.com/littleosbook/littleosbook

Please be aware that some typos and errors have been discovered, check the issues for more details!


Been looking for something like this for a while now, thanks a lot! Any plans to do something with 64-bit?


Thanks! There are no plans for an x86-64 version at the moment. The focus for me right now will be to incorporate all the great feedback we've gotten, fix the issues that have been reported and make it easier to contribute.


Codes that are used in the book hosted on github? If so can you post the url?


There is unfortunately no sample code for each chapter, but you can have a look at https://github.com/helino/aenix (the code in the book is based on aenix).


Very nice, a guide like this would have saved me a full year at some point in the past.

Note that this is 32 bit specific. I'd be very interested in a 64 bit version of this.


I think the main part that is missing is an in depth analysis of what we actually want from an OS.

Building an OS from scratch is nice, but I think the requirements may have changed since the 80s. :)


Yes. What this book leads you to is a classic UNIX-like OS - drivers in the kernel, a console, paged virtual memory. It doesn't lead you to a microkernel or a hypervisor or a cluster.


Is there a similar guide available for ARM? x86 seems pretty messy.


Check out chapter 10 of the Definitive Guide to ARM [1]. It's not a guide, but the best resource I found in regards to OS support on the platform.

1. http://books.google.com/books?id=5OZblBzjsJ0C&pg=PA181&lpg=P...


Would be lovely if someone try to something similar with Trillek's computer. should be more easy to do a little OS, as there isn't MMU, segments or privileged levels to be worried. A simple 32 bit cpu with a flat memory model, and a simple instruction set.


Trying to link the kernel with the GNU ld script on page 12 of the PDF, I get this error:

ld:link.ld:5: syntax error

Not familiar with GNU ld script syntax, anyone know how to fix this?



This book is under 100 pages. Awesome! This is what I was looking for. :)


this is exactly what is was looking for , thank you


Why not just link it to http://littleosbook.github.io/ - While PDFs are fine, it takes so long for it to load when compared to a HTML page.


> Why not just link it to http://littleosbook.github.io/ -

To get around the previous-submission url filter. The url you mentioned was posted several hours before this submission, by a different user.

http://hn.algolia.com/legacy#!/story/forever/prefix/0/little...


I generally prefer PDFs for archiving. HTML is good for following hyperlinks, though.




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