1 – Writing an Operating System – Episode 0 (Introduction)

1 – Writing an Operating System – Episode 0 (Introduction)

I have always been fascinated by an operating system, the amount of work that operating system can do and what it can do is very impressive for me.

At a young age of 14 (1999) I dreamed of developing my own operating system. I started learning and after a year, I did build boot loader as well as a tiny kernel to handle input via keyboard, perform calculation and show output on the VGA screen. I could not spend enough time to take it further.

However, Later work life started and in 2004 I got a project to write an embedded operating system for a device. I agreed and developed a tiny operating system which had it’s own file system as well. It did not have any GUI.

So far I ended up developing two embedded operating system and one operation system just for hobby.

In the world of modern application development, I felt disconnected with computers. I wanted to connect with computer again and writing an operating system is the best way to get closer to computer again.

I am going to write a series of blog post about writing an operating system from scratch along with detailed explanation. Operating system will include following basic features:

• Boot loader
• Kernel
• It’s own File System
• Multi-Threading / Multi-Tasking
• Ability to read and write FAT and FAT 32 File System
• GUI (Support for Keyboard and Mouse)
• Painting application
• Audio System and ability to play WAV, MP3, 3gp files.
• Network stack
• TCP/IP
• Sockets
• Browser
• Development Environment
• Communication with GPU
• Printer support
• WiFi and Bluetooth support
• APIs (External Application development support)
• Pen Drive Auto Mount Support
• Couple of Games
• Development Tool (IDE)
• DHCP Client, DHCP Server, DNS Client, DNS Server, Web Server
• many more…

If you have any wish list, feel free to comment below.

Stay tuned for the next blog post.