(sorry about double posting, I forgot to put Show HN in front in the original
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863689 thread)
Hey all,
As a follow up to my relatively successful series in x86 Assembly of last year[1], I started making an OS that fits in a boot sector. I am purposefully not doing chain loading or multi-stage to see how much I can squeeze out of 510bytes.
It comes with a file system, a shell, and a simple process management. Enough to write non-trivial guest applications, like a text editor and even some games. It's a lot of fun!
It comes with an SDK and you can play around with it in the browser to see what it looks like.
The aim is, as always, to make Assembly less scary and this time around also OS development.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41571971
In 2004, Gavin Barraclough’s mini-OS [0] won the IOCCC, packing a 32-bit multitasking operating system for x86 computers, with GUI and filesystem, support for loading and executing user applications in ELF binary format, with PS/2 mouse and keyboard drivers, VESA graphics, a command shell, and an application into 3.5 KB of highly obfuscated C code.
In 2021, Justine Tunney wrote SectorLISP [1], a Lisp implementation that fits into a bootsector and is able to run McCarthy’s metacircular evaluator.
[0]: https://www.ioccc.org/2004/gavin/index.html [1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp