Snowdrop OS – a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

http://sebastianmihai.com/snowdrop/

by ksec • 1 year ago

308 81 1 year ago

sebastianmihai.com

hsnewman• 1 year ago

This does run on the MiSTer!

thebeardisred• 1 year ago

To be clear: x86 assembly.

Narishma• 1 year ago

To be even clearer, 16-bit real mode x86 assembly.

vdupras• 1 year ago

That's an impressive collection of tools and apps they've built there. And yet, it doesn't seem like they succumbed to the temptation of making it self hosting! I guess the assembler would need some work to bring it to parity with nasm... or bring the whole source code closer to Snowdrop ASM!

DustinBrett• 1 year ago

At least they provide an ISO/IMG. I still wish SerenityOS would do this.

haunter• 1 year ago

Serenity has nightly build images https://serenity-builds.halves.dev/

mouse_• 1 year ago

But Serenity does not provide them.

pjmlp• 1 year ago

Kudos, quite an impressive work.

V32, BASIC compiler. :)

Well we can make feature requests, I guess.

Tiberium• 1 year ago

To anyone who's interested in such projects: also check MenuetOS and KolibriOS (which is a fork of Menuet that diverged a looong time ago). MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is closed source.

spogbiper• 1 year ago

also TempleOS if you'd prefer something more insane

mihular• 1 year ago

Holy C, no less

meifun2• 1 year ago

I was coming to the comments to write this reminds me of Terry Davis, may be rest in peace. It might sound strange but Terry provided me with inspiration and a reminder that anything can be created or “Willed into existence”.

ksp-atlas• 1 year ago

ZealOS is TempleOS but with support for some modern functionality, however this detracts from the proper TempleOS experience

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

I watched a few Terry's streams and TempleOS seems to be something pretty fluid to use. You literally navigate in the console, or whatever it is called, and can open any file the current cursor points to.

theoreticalmal• 1 year ago

This is the best rabbit hole I’ve gone down in awesome. Thanks for sharing!

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

I am interested in learning assembly language. I searched in Coursera but didn't find anything suitable for a total beginner (I have experience in Java and am doing some C/C++ courses to get closer to metal).

asalahli• 1 year ago

I highly recomment this NASM tutorial for an introduction to x86-64 https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/

fuzztester2• 1 year ago

Check out assembly language books by Randall Hyde and Paul Carter, two authors of two different books on the topic.

Search for:

The Art of Assembly Language by Randall Hyde

Carter book:

http://pacman128.github.io/pcasm/

drivers992• 1 year ago

This might interest you: Writing a C Compiler by Nora Sandler (No Starch Press). You create a working C compiler that outputs x64 assembly language in the first chapter (as long as the program only returns an integer from main) and then you keep adding features one by one for the rest of the book. You can write the compiler in any language you like (I’m using Python) and you only write the compiler while using your system’s precompiler (the step that handles #include and #define etc and removes comments), linker, and assembler. You just read preprocessed C as text and output assembly as text.

The thing that makes it relevant for learning assembly is that’s what you’re outputting so you’ll be learning that as well as what’s going on with the stack when calling and returning from functions and using local variables and basically everything that corresponds to C. (I’m only on chapter 2.)

Some other reasons it might work out for you is that you are getting into C as well already, and you have a familiar language you could use for the compiler if you wanted: java (assuming it doesn’t take too long to compile and run a java program repeatedly)

thinkling• 1 year ago

CodeAcademy: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/computer-architecture-assem...

MIT open courseware: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-004-computation-structures-spr...

miki123211• 1 year ago

MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is closed source.

What's the point of making something like that closed source in 2025?

Would anybody actually use such a thing except for as a hobby OS, on a multi-core X64 machine no less?

spookie• 1 year ago

It's available for download for free, if that's the concern.

amelius2• 1 year ago

What are the latest cool ideas in OS design, both from a user's viewpoint and from an OS hacker's viewpoint?

honestSysAdmin5• 1 year ago

The best answer, given the specific opposite edges you have broadly specified, is

  https://redox-os.org/

amelius2• 1 year ago

Most system components run in user-space on a microkernel system. Because of this, bugs in most system components won’t crash the system/kernel.

It's funny because I want this when I write applications. Each library should run in its own sandbox, and by default they shouldn't be able to touch each other's data.

IshKebab2• 1 year ago

Redox is Unix-like. It's not going to contain any significantly new ideas.

IshKebab2• 1 year ago

Fuchsia has a crap load of wild ideas. Microkernel, capabilities, weird app installation system (I think they're trying to make apps more like websites).

https://rtic.rs/ is a pretty cool idea for an embedded RTOS (sort of).

Honestly though there's still stuff in Plan 9 that is way more advanced than what Linux does, e.g. https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html

mycall• 1 year ago

Genode [1] has an interesting approach to OS design as it is a framework, but how much is assembly I don't know.

[1] https://genode.org

machinestops• 1 year ago

Plan 9's cool ideas largely still haven't been surpassed or reimplemented.

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/3rd_edition/rio/rio_slides.pdf

yencabulator• 1 year ago

It's surprisingly hard to use 9P and get good performance because the design sort of inherently forbids caching for "real" file data. Trying to add that on top pretty much sacrifices the simplicity and starts looking a lot more like NFSv4.

junon2• 1 year ago

It's "quietly public" but I've been working on a novel kernel design, this (12th, and final) rewrite undergoing development for about a year now.

https://github.com/oro-os/kernel

It's a user-less, capability-less microkernel design that enforces access control via the kernel's entity hierarchy. Shared memory ports with various levels of safety are the primary form of IPC, typed at the kernel level.

Currently undergoing later stages of the kernel efficacy stage; if I can prove the design I'll do a more formal writeup. It's been a project in my head for about 8 years and in the editor for about 4 now.

unixhero4• 1 year ago

In OSes like these, I always enjoy reading about how the bootloader is kickstarted and how the OS is loaded. I don't know why :)

quanto3• 1 year ago

In a similar spirit, what are some progresses in performant RTOSes for robotics? There seems to be relatively less interest in that field.

No, ROS/ROS2 is not an operating system and is not what most people call performant software.

doelie_• 1 year ago

Not an RTOS as is commonly understood but RTIC is nice. I think originally developed for robotics.

https://rtic.rs

bigfishrunning• 1 year ago

I think people who are serious about it run QNX or VxWorks. Most robotics projects aren't serious and run Ubuntu unfortunately.

m00x2• 1 year ago

I don't think you're familiar with modern robotics.

The central control plane is Ubuntu, but the boards for actuators and sensors are all microcontrollers on some kind of RTOS or FPGAs.

rubicks• 1 year ago

Can confirm. $DAYJOB makes robots subject to hard worst-case latency constraints. The product runs on QNX.

theamk2• 1 year ago

"x86" and "RTOS" don't really work together, given SMM, complex caches, and so on. If you have any sort of high-performance task, you'll likely want to have an separate embedded MCU (or a dozen of them) to control it.

And embedded stuff has a ton of OS'es, such as FreeRTOS, Zephyr, ThreadX... And there are plenty of proprietary solutions, like Nvidia DriveOS.

The embedded OSes are quite limited compared to regular ones like Linux - the task scheduler is present, but everything else (like processes, filesystem, dynamic file loading, binary tools, etc...) is either missing or optional.

quanto3• 1 year ago

I am aware that FreeRTOS and Zephyr are popular but in your opinion, do these form a comprehensive ecosystem and foundation for engineers build robots? I am not aware of any major robotics projects using these MCU OSes as a paradigm (as opposed to an auxiliary component connected to a main OS). I had a robotics colleague at a high profile lab saying that Windows is the de facto standard.

Jotalea• 1 year ago

Reminds me of TempleOS.

notorandit• 1 year ago

Looks like menuetos, but 16 bit.

qingcharles• 1 year ago

I did the same in the mid-90s but for a 32-bit hobby GUI OS. This book was absolutely essential reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd...

ossm1db• 1 year ago

Read it for free: https://web.archive.org/web/20140704223135/https://www.ipdat...

"When Sensory Publishing gained the rights, they changed the name and they printed another run of a thousand to keep it available in print. They are down to 200 copies or so and no longer sell it. The book is now in the public domain and any books will be kept for the Great Alexandria Library."

dang• 1 year ago

Related. Others?

Homebrew an OS from Scratch? Snowdrop Shows How It's Done - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39005640 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)

Snowdrop OS – a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28090574 - Aug 2021 (3 comments)

xiaodai• 1 year ago

Totally RAD!

K0balt• 1 year ago

I’d love to see Something like this ported to the esp32, maybe on the ttgo vga32 board or something. A basic GUI and shell type OS with SDcard, vga, sound, kb/mouse, wifi, Bluetooth. A modern Commodore-ish 64 experience, with WiFi printing (text only?), a lynx type browser, email, IRC, gopher, etc.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

"Requirements for building Snowdrop OS

Works on: Windows XP 32bit, Windows 98, Windows 95"

mschultzzy• 1 year ago

Does it run Black Ops 6?

Snowdrop OS – a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

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