Finally got my hobby OS up and running on real hardware. I love the old IBM thinkpads, so thought it was the perfect machine to get it working on. Been working on it for quite some time now, but this has been a big milestone!
These things are way better to see than stupid AI. It’s not going to “sell”, but it’s a tech person being creative and doing their craft.
I used to study a lot of hobbyist OS development in my late teens. It was awesome, I still try doing small kernels from time to time (last one was a RISCV small kernel that printed a message to my partner).
I think the default system font should be a more condensed variant; it would make the system look much more refined. There are a number of areas where it's clear you need more horizontal space for characters. Each character should have less width, and there should be as little space between the characters as possible - just a single pixel ought to be enough at the font size and resolution you're using.
I don't know anything about your font system; I'm assuming it's fixed width bitmap fonts? I don't know how hard it would be to make these changes within your codebase so if it's too much work then don't worry about it.
I've been building a web OS site from scratch for a while now (not as technically impressive as what you're doing) and I just got through a total rewrite of the font classes, so it's at the top of my mind.
I agree my current font is very sub optimal. It’s basically still the original font I got working when I started out. I have looked into rendering proper fonts, so it’s on my todo list. Just have been neglecting it.
I had the same problem, I made a 3x4 font that was just barely servicable for the initial project to show text on screen. It was my first (and only) font I ever made! Eventually I needed lower-case, so I turned those into lower-case and made a 3x5 variant for uppercase. It's still not ideal, and I'm sure when I announce my project, people will complain about it. So I've prepared to say "it's a stop-gap solution to make the OS servicable, but we can make more fonts."
I think people skimming a project often just don't quite get how much we pour into our projects, and how very much it cost us. But it's okay, they don't have to understand just how cool it is what we made. At least we know.
When I saw your video of your project, I was thinking to myself, "wow, that's incredibly cool, and I can relate to the steps he's doing!" Just trying to be the voice here of someone who thought that way, in case there are no others.
If you want a quick improvement over that 8by8 IBM ROM font, I suggest two things:
1. Switch to a 16by16 square.
2. For the ASCII range, go with one of the old home computer fonts, rather than IBM ROMs. Viznut has .hex files for Commodore PET and BBC Micro graphics modes squirrelled away inside Unscii.
I've done the work of upscaling the 8by8 PET font to 16by16, and it works quite nicely as a monospace square font. These old home computer fonts were of course designed to. Whereas in the world of VGA you're soon in trouble with glyphs designed for 9by16.
The 8x16 font from the Atari ST's hi-res mode is pretty slick if you like something bold and a little futuristic.
https://github.com/ntwk/atarist-font (or rip it directly from the ROM)
Supporting variable-width fonts is pretty easy on its own (if bit-packing, you might wish to store them vertically), but does complicate combining characters (remember, they go in different places and may need to make the new character larger).
For vector fonts, the interesting question is "if I render this at a different resolution and then scale it, will it line up?" which fundamentally has no answer that can satisfy everyone. Most other difficulties are merely a Small Matter of Coding (and providing appropriate APIs).
Could you elaborate on how this compiler interacts with the operating system? Specifically, how does it handle features like structs, and what are the current limitations or planned enhancements in this area?
Just adding this comment to say congratulations and how impressed I am by your project! I've been an OS Dev fan since my teens and it feels great to see this achievement come to life. I am a little curious to know how the graphics subsystem is initialized. I wish you the best of success.
Congrats! Looks great coming from someone who had a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977. I have been toying with KolibriOS and MenuetOSx64, but I would sure like to try rolling my own OS. You did it! Keep truckin'!
This is great! What would you do differently if you started again today?
What are your thoughts on language suitability for the lower level parts (ie. Sticking to c or a simple subset of c++ or any of the newer languages)?
Given the myriad of resources available, how did you manage to keep the project engaging rather than copying others people code?
Thanks for the feedback! I think the biggest thing I’d do different is to have a plan. I just started out with the goal of doing the basic hello world OS, and that’s it. But then I kept adding new things, adding more and more working on multiple things at the same time. Which has lead to some technical debt I’m still trying to fix. I’d also try to be less UNIX dependent.
Regarding language, I love C for its basic syntax and “straight to the point” style. Maybe I’d consider some other languages for userspace applications.
A goal for me from the start was always that I wanted to write everything myself, no porting of any software, and for me that’s the entire point of the project. I mostly adhered to the rule of copy ideas not code.
I'm not sure it's a bad thing to not necessarily have a plan. Intuition is the hidden sister of logic, both children of reason, and we don't always see her because she's often behind the scenes doing all the work.
Technical debt is as sure as death and taxes. Good software grows over time, like a person growing up. Sometimes you have parts that are needed for a time but not permanently, like baby teeth. That's what technical debt is like.
Other times there are parts that are absolutely ideal long term, but it's a long time before they even make sense. And sometimes things only develop much later than we expect, like wisdom teeth. These are software features that won't make sense until you write the thing that you don't realize yet is only temporary.
I have the same goal of writing everything myself from scratch. It's a very important goal to me for a reason I don't fully understand yet.
Congrats on writing an entire OS, and getting it booting on real hardware! That must be such a rewarding feeling in its own right, even if no one understood how. And it looks so very cool.
You've given me more motivation to announce my project soon. Maybe next week. Thanks.
Have you played around with Zig yet? I hear that would be a good replacement for C here. Did you have any thoughts on porting your OS to that, or did you have any branches some Zig code made its way into?
I’d love to hear about you project! Seeing what other people make is a big inspiration. I have not tried Zig, for the kernel I don’t think anything will beat C for me personally. But for userspace applications I’d love to try it!
It's interesting that a few of these projects seem to be reaching milestones at the same time. It's reassuring to see that there are people out there who are still working on this deep of a level with computers and sharing their results with us.
While I share the sentiment (and have been noodling with similar projects), unfortunately the minimum is around 4 seconds as the VideoCore chip is what boots first, then after about 4 seconds hands things over to the ARM chip, which can effectively boot instantly with this sort of OS.
Out of curiosity, why can’t you spare time? I’d be pretty lost without my hobby projects (one of them was a toy OS, but that stopped when low level OS development became my actual job), ever since I was a kid.
I have an old eee pc myself! Tested it on that one too, performance is alright, not really optimized but since it’s so “basic” compared to real OSes it should be quite fast. Bigger problems are bugs and lack of functionality for real hardware. (Userspace applications are only available on the QEMU images.
Oh man I wish such big accomplishments were documented on video like Andreas Kling did with SerenityOS https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling
.. learned a lot from his videos
Yeah… kinda wish that too in hindsight. I have screenshots of the entire development process from the very start, and of course my git history. Never thought I’d get this far.
Congrats on hitting the milestone! This is exactly the kind of work I want to see on HN: passion projects just for the sake of making something, not advertisements, market news, or AI bullshit.
I used to study a lot of hobbyist OS development in my late teens. It was awesome, I still try doing small kernels from time to time (last one was a RISCV small kernel that printed a message to my partner).
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