My own minimal OS.
This is very much a learning project, it will probably never go beyond that. My ultimate goal is to get it to a point where I can switch to 64-bit long mode and have full MP APIC support so that I can play with timers and perf in various VM environments.
Beyond that, who knows...
Some features (some done, some constantly in flux)
- 32-bit protected mode kernel, virtual memory mapped ("high" kernel).
- PIC and PIT support (clock and interrupts).
- libc functionality (like printf).
- memory management (arenas, pools).
- basic task management (in-kernel switching only).
- multi-cpu support.
Built on knowledge from:
- https://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page
- http://www.osdever.net
- www.jamesmolloy.co.uk
- Tanebaum & Woodhull "Operating Systems"
- countless blog posts and stackoverflow snippets...
- GCC cross compiler built locally.
- GRUB 2 loader.
- make and build scripts, based on https://wiki.osdev.org/Meaty_Skeleton.
- NASM (because I just can't stomach AT&T syntax).
- Bochs debugger http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/internal-debugger.html .
- VSCode & VisualStudio.
- WSL.
- QEMU and GDB.
- VMWare Workstation Player (free).
The kernel itself is built in Ubuntu running in WSL, using the locally built GCC cross compiler (9.2.0 at the time of writing).
I edit the code in VSCode or VisualStudio, using the latter for the "lab" project which is where I experiment with various pieces of functionality in a more easy-to-debug-and-test environment (at least for me).
The project itself is managed using makefiles and built using a couple of bash scripts, build.sh and iso.sh being the main ones.
To debug I use a mix of bochsdbg and gdb, the former runs directly in Windows and is quick to get up and running and since it's an emulator it is ideal for debugging hardware state issues. In the code I use a macro _JOS_BOCHS_DBGBREAK to break at particular points, this works but is of course not as smooth as in-debugger source level breakpoints. For that you need GDB.
To use GDB I run the kernel in qemu, in a VMWare Ubuntu VM, and start it in suspended listening mode with the parameters -s -S. The debug build configuration for the kernel outputs a symbol file (as jos.sym) which I load into GDB for source level debugging.
In addition I use serial port tracing (K_TRACE in the code) and good ol' printf.
The best place to start is in kernel\arch\i386\kernel_loader.asm. This is where the kernel is first loaded by GRUB and where it sets up the initial descriptor tables, memory mappings, and switches to protected mode.
It invokes code in kernel\kernel\kernel.c which is where all the kernel subsystems are initialised and test code runs, etc.