2024 Operating System

This project is a fun OS excursion inspired by my college operating systems class. The professor put forth a challenge to make an OS that performs some simple operations.

Caution

I'd like to explicitely mention that this kernel has not been tested on real hardware, and thus I can't guaruntee the safety of running this outside of a VM. A couple things of note:

• The FAT12 driver isnt smart in which drive it chooses, which means if the hardware configuration is any different to how the build system is setup I can't guaruntee it won't overwrite data on other connected drives.

Context and technologies used

• As I am developing this on my Mac, I had to setup quite a bit of build steps to get a functioning kernel binary out of it. Docker is used to run all the commands that are not supported on macos such as grub.
• I realized early on a simple Makefile wasn't going to be enough for this project so I opted for bash/powershell scripts that contain all the build commands. If you're on Windows, you'll use scripts/build.ps1. If you're on Linux/MacOS, you'll use scripts/build.sh

Uncomprehensive feature list

• Global Descriptor Table
• Interrupt Descriptor Table
• Printf
• Serial port communication
• Simple VGA Driver
• Simple FAT driver
  • File reading
  • File appending
  • File creation
  • File deletion
• Simple shell
  • read <filename> - read the file from the fat system with name of 'filename'
  • newf <filename> - create new file ready to be appended to
  • appf <filename> <quoted> - append the "quoted text" to the end of the file specified by 'filename'
  • list - lists all the files on the fat drive
  • reboot - restarts the operating system (no need to relaunch qemu)
  • clear - clears the shell area
• Simple malloc/free implementation
• Terminal User Interface

Building

NOTE: The required software for Linux/Macos, and Windows should be the same. See below.

• Required software

  • docker
    • The required image is around 1 gigabyte in size and takes roughly 5 minutes to build
  • qemu (or some other virtualization software)
    • specifically we need qemu-system-i386

• Optional software

  • A host C compiler (for tests)

Step By Step

Important

It is always wise to verify script contents before running

Linux/MacOS

See LinuxMacOS_Build.md for how to install on Linux/MacOS

Windows

See Windows_Build.md for how to install on Linux/MacOS

Usage

See Usage.md for some basics on how the OS works

Resources

OliveStem OS Playlist
osdev-wiki
Nanobyte FAT Driver