Show HN: I made my own OS from scratch because I was bored

https://jotalea.com.ar/misc/jotaleaos/

by Jotalea • 1 year ago

224 82 1 year ago

jotalea.com.ar

I've wanted to make my own OS since I started programming. Now, 5 years later, I did it (kind of).

Sure, it is really basic, has very little functionality, but I made it and I'm proud of that. Oh, and I'm just 16 btw.

ranger_danger4• 1 year ago

How can we download only the source code?

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

The source code comes in a bundle that includes a compiler, an emulator, and some extra tools. While I don't see an advantage on downloading the source code alone, I won't deny it.

Just note that there are three different "branches":

- stable: This is the one being distributed in the website

- neofetch: This one exists because I couldn't get the ASCII art to fit within 512 bytes along with the rest of features

- multistage (untested): Here I'm trying to work with jumps in memory to handle different commands and features (and include them all in one release). I read online that I can compile them separately and then merge the binaries to get jumps to work. But I haven't finished it, and it probably won't compile as it is right now.

That said, here is the source code for all of them: https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/wB9kfq1umxW2

edit: fixed missing newlines

codecraze• 1 year ago

Congratulations on your project!

Out of curiosity why don’t you put the source code on github?

mysterydip• 1 year ago

I made it and I'm proud of that

And that's all that matters for a hobby project. Congrats!

gtirloni• 1 year ago

Nice accomplishment. I usually do things because I'm excited about something :)

ktbwrestler• 1 year ago

Great job, something like this is also a really great way to get your foot in the door with a job when the time comes.

I like that you have the site in both Spanish and English!

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and since I'm planning to share this project in Hispanic communities too, it would be bad to not have my own language in it.

Though following that logic, I should also make my OS in Spanish too... I guess I could add some kind of translation dictionary, I'm not sure. I guess I'll do it in the future.

thereticent• 1 year ago

I'm impressed with your dedication and also amazed that I ran into this on HN. My 9-year-old just showed me your Geometry Dash remake in Scratch. You're like a legend to him and his friends!

teruakohatu• 1 year ago

There has perviously been a nice guide posted on HN on getting code to run on bare metal:

https://johv.dk/blog/bare-metal-assembly-tutorial.html

kitd• 1 year ago

TIL about UefiShell.iso.

iwontberude• 1 year ago

Congratulations are in store but of course you are a special kind of person to escape boredom this way. It’s a gift and a curse. Good luck!

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Thanks ;)

caspper692• 1 year ago

The page isn't in English, but Google helpfully translated it for me.

Without source, and only those commands available, it's kind of difficult to see what you've implemented and how far you progressed.

Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection? Do you ever jump to a user space context?

Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?

Like Groundhog Day, I have been doing this over and over and over for the last 25 years.

So many toy kernels, so many ideas and tests and watching A's and B's and C's and D's flash on the screen. Memory dumps. Writing executable loaders. Poring over the Intel/AMD manuals (and later AARCH64). ACPI (ugh). Trying to implement the techniques from the latest papers (usually in an effort to maximize the performance of a microkernel-ish design).

It's all great fun of course, so I'm not lamenting that, but when you start to get to the userspace infrastructure, unless you're YOLO'ing it with libc and POSIX compatibility, everything is so opinionated, and there's SO MUCH TO BUILD, I just kind of peter out.

It's been about 18 months or so since I last had the itch, but it's inevitable that I'll do it all over again.

Best of luck!

gazook89• 1 year ago

Immediately after the opening header there is a button to switch to English, fyi.

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

There actually is a Switch to English button at the top of the screen, which of course translates the whole website to English, and adds more details that I know English-speaking people would be interested on (for example, the source code), while Spanish-speakers won't. And even if they are, they have a note saying "for more details, check the English version of the site"; and I'm sure that if they can understand those details, they can also understand English.

Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection?

No, not yet. I still have to learn that

Do you ever jump to a user space context?

I mean, I haven't put any restrictions, just as I haven't put many features that I would consider user space.

Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?

I saw a video about TempleOS, and got motivated to make my own OS from scratch. Of course, TOS is a ~15 years-in-work project, while mine has been just a couple days/weeks, these are very far from each other.

I guess my final goal with it would be to get Minecraft running? I don't know, getting a Java program (or Java itself) to run on an OS from scratch sounds too complicated for me.

My current goal is to get Bad Apple on ASCII to show up on this, but to do that I need to save a lot of variables, one for each frame, and there being ~6000 frames, it would take a huge lot more than 512 bytes, so I would need to get jumps in memory to work so I can have these many variables set, which is what I would be working on now, if I hadn't other stuff to do.

Best of luck!

Thanks :)

caspper692• 1 year ago

Yeah, I didn't notice the site switch to English link; If I had seen it, I might have also seen the source, lol. Sorry about that.

Terry Davis, the author of TempleOS, was fairly well known online. He had a lot of struggles psychologically, and met an unfortunate end a few years ago. It's an interesting case, but I honestly wouldn't take too much from the project. He was a gifted developer, but he did things for reasons that were decidedly non-technical.

For building up your knowledge (you can't only read the reference manuals, after all), there's a ton of resources online, but a particularly good one is the OSDev wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page. I can't speak for it as it exists today because I've been out of the game for too long, but it was maintained by helpful folks. I didn't check to see if the forums are still up, but there used to be a wealth of information in them back in the day too.

As a note, relying on BIOS is ok, but the whole write a bootsector in 512 bytes to switch to 386 protected mode, to then switch to long mode (64-bit) is kind of outdated (the modern computer boot process is handled by the UEFI firmware, and by the time your OS binary is loaded, the CPU is already in long mode with paging enabled and setup with a flat linear mapping of physical memory).

Not to say that the method/approach is worthless (it's all learning), it's just that you spend an awful lot of time doing things in the whole mode-switching dance that are basically tossed in the bin almost immediately, and most of it has nothing at all to do with OS development. UEFI at least allows you to start on the real meat & potatoes without spinning your wheels on code that isn't going to stick around very long.

4ggr0• 1 year ago

why are spanish-speaking people not interested in source-code?

what about bilingual people, do they have an average amount of interest for the source-code?

krylon• 1 year ago

Respect! This is really cool!

colesantiago• 1 year ago

Nice job, keep it up!

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Thanks :)

asdf0987• 1 year ago

despite saying it's open source, there's no link to read source code e.g github.

ranger_danger4• 1 year ago

why do you think that is a requirement to being called open source?

martzy13• 1 year ago

I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement, But when I think open source - I usually think about being able to browse the code in some type of repository, in a human readable format.

I like to browse a codebase in some way that I don’t have to download and unzip an unknown set of files.

freedomben• 1 year ago

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a project claiming to be "open source" provide the source code in some form. It needn't be on github (GP merely sites Github as an example), but there should at least be a link of some kind, whether a zip file or a git remote or something. It's not a requirement, but it is something that most people (reasonably IMHO) expect.

layer8• 1 year ago

We need more bored people.

notfed2• 1 year ago

I desperately wish to be bored. (Context: I have a job)

w10-1• 1 year ago

trade you?

amelius• 1 year ago

We need new ideas in OS/kernel development, not reiterations of the same old (boring) ideas ...

(imho)

swiftcoder4• 1 year ago

Quick, someone light the UBI signal

jart4• 1 year ago

That's called living off interest, dividends, and stock growth.

zeroq• 1 year ago

anyone remembers Argante (https://argante.sourceforge.net/concept.html)?

changexd• 1 year ago

Great work! I'm usually bored too, sometimes I find something to study or try to implement known tech, but only give up when I feel like it's too hard for me or it's too much work haha, this motivates me a bit.

pshirshov• 1 year ago

It's not actually an OS, it's more like a simple stub from osdev, a simple program running on bare metal.

veltas2• 1 year ago

Got to agree, not to knock OP for sharing this because this is a fun hobby project, but to most people this doesn't meet even loose definitions of OS.

I'd say this is a bootable environment or something.

To be an OS it would have to have some way to run programs as well.

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

To me, an OS is a piece of software that can boot in a computer without requiring anything from another OS as host, and allows running programs bundled with the OS (like Paint on windows 1.1), and if supported, 3rd party programs.

noone_youknow• 1 year ago

Everyone has to start somewhere, and many who try don’t even get this far (I’m not sure I would have at OP’s age either).

Karellen2• 1 year ago

Well, the earliest version of the code that would morph first into a terminal emulator, and eventually become Linux "was written to use one thread to write the letter A to the screen. The other thread wrote the letter B."¹ Who knows what direction this OS will evolve along?

¹ Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun, pp.63

lolinder• 1 year ago

To anyone else who read the Spanish version first, note that the English version is longer and has the link to download the source code!

KTibow• 1 year ago

fyi, you can automatically detect the user's language and switch to English when applicable by using `navigator.language`...

...or even better, don't use JS (which doesn't work on older browsers and prevents some optimizations), and read the Accept-Language header instead

account422• 1 year ago

And please do NOT do what gogle does and pretend that certain values in the Accept-Language header don't indicate a user preference and you should guess based on the IP address instead.

jmkni• 1 year ago

lol well done :)

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

thx

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

Copado, cuales son sus dependencias?

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Para compilar teniendo un host windows (lo odio pero no tengo otra opción) están todas las dependencias incluidas en el Dev Kit.

Ahora, si estás en Linux me imagino que nomás necesitas nasm (el compilador) y build tools. Igual no estoy seguro..

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

Ah pero eso para compilar, osea que no hay dependencias de runtime tipo otro linux. Es todo assembly.

heyyfurqan• 1 year ago

Awesome!

qingcharles• 1 year ago

This is a really good step-by-step reference to writing your own OS:

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

Find a copy on your favorite shadow library.

anandnair• 1 year ago

Website is not working?

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Uhh, it is?

The server I use apparently blocks specific devices or ISPs, it has happened to me a couple times and I haven't found a solution other than using a VPN or a different device on a different network.

The tools they give me don't cover this device blocking, so I guess that either they manage it or it is managed automatically.

I will switch to self hosting once I get an actual server.

p0w3n3d• 1 year ago

Le agradezco a Duolingo, no necesité cambiar el idioma a inglés cuando entré a tu sitio web.

mportela• 1 year ago

Great, now go back to study before Duolingo kidnaps your family

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Jajaja, yo llevo estudiando inglés desde los 3 años. No me arrepiento.

Timwi• 1 year ago

La hispana sonas tiel simile al Esperanto, sed tamen, mi komprenas preskaŭ nenion mdr

not_your_mentat• 1 year ago

Isn't disclosing your age a HR violation? ;)

guy234• 1 year ago

what

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

No? Or at least not as far as I know.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

Reminds me somewhat of https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal-OS

tomhee• 1 year ago

Nice job! Just started my own too.

revskill• 1 year ago

Another medium blog so i could not access.

Jotalea17• 1 year ago

Uhh, it is not medium, it is my own website.

Show HN: I made my own OS from scratch because I was bored

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