Read somewhere that it is relatively easy to adapt NetBSD's drivers into a custom kernel... maybe Serenity folks can go that way? Device drivers are huge obstacle for any fledgling OS.
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I've wondered if new/hobby OSes would fare better by starting out targeting a popular single board computer like a raspberry pi? A mostly fixed set of hardware to make/get drivers for and test your system on.
But yes, raspi is a good platform if you are targeting arm.
As I'm also designing an OS, my biggest piece of advice for anyone seriously considering it is to target two archs at once, in parallel. Then adding a third becomes much easier.
(And even then, its USB controller, for example, has no publicly-available datasheet. If you want to write your own driver for it, you have to read the Linux driver source and adapt it for your needs.)
That's as far as I got before discovering the Armbian project could handle all that for me. Coincidentally that's also when I discovered QEMU because 512MB was no longer enough to pip install pycrypto once they switched to Rust and cargo. My pip install that worked fine with earlier versions suddenly started crashing due to running out of memory, so I got to use Armbians faculties for creating a disk image by building everything on the target architecture via QEMU. Pretty slick. This was for an Orange Pi.
IS that the reason for the full screen of colors before you see the boot sequence? Never thought about that.
The "color gamut" display, as you call it, is a GPU test pattern, created by start.elf (or start4.elf, or one of the other start*.elf files, depending on what is booting). That 3rd stage bootloader is run by the GPU which configures other hardware (like the ARM cores and RAM split).
Kernel is still in early stages but progress is steady - it's "quietly public". https://github.com/oro-os