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Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time

(sdomi.pl)
309 points LorenDB | 2 comments | 08 Jan 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.683s | source
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Santosh83 ◴[08 Jan 25 18:46 UTC] No.42637177[source]▶
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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mysterydip ◴[08 Jan 25 19:18 UTC] No.42637487[source]▶
> Device drivers are a huge obstacle for any fledgling OS.

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.

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junon ◴[08 Jan 25 22:31 UTC] No.42639203[source]▶
That implies AArch64 support which many hobby OSes don't have, usually because the introductory osdev material is written largely for x86.

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.

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1. LeFantome ◴[09 Jan 25 20:34 UTC] No.42649587[source]▶
It seems like a lot of the OS dev momentum is shifting to RISC-V. Lots of recent tutorials and courses going that way. Any links to your OS?
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2. junon ◴[10 Jan 25 07:14 UTC] No.42653395[source]▶
RISC-V is the new hotness but it has limited usefulness in general purpose osdev at the moment due to slower chips (for now) and the fact not a lot of ready-to-go boards use them. I definitely think that's changing and I plan to target RISC-V; I have just always had an x86 machine, and I have built some electronics that use aarch64, so I went with those to start.

Kernel is still in early stages but progress is steady - it's "quietly public". https://github.com/oro-os