Writing an operating system kernel from scratch

> I will never not find this kind of project incredibly impressive

I wouldn’t call it incredibly impressive. The path on how to write a minimal multi-tasking kernel has been beaten decades ago.

Writing a kernel that can boot and do a few things is ‘just’ a matter of being somewhat smart and have some perseverance. Doing it for RISC-V complicates things a bit compared to x86, but there, too, the information about initialising the hardware often is easily obtained (for example: https://wiki.osdev.org/RISC-V_Meaty_Skeleton_with_QEMU_virt_... I wouldn’t know whether this project used that)

I think the author agrees, given (FTA) that they wrote “This is a redo of an exercise I did for my undergraduate course in operating systems”

It’s work, may be nice work, but I think everybody with a degree in software engineering could do this. Yes, the OS likely will have bugs, certainly will have rough edges, but getting something that can multi-process, with processes shielded from each other by a MMU isn’t hard anymore.

> I think everybody with a degree in software engineering could do this

Ideally this would be true, but it hasn't been my experience at all. At least with American graduates, I can't speak to other countries.

Is there a book one can read to learn how to create one?

To you maybe. The subset of population that is even interested, smart, persevering to do this is extremely tiny.

My CS undergrad in the UK had us write an ARM kernel with scheduling and IPC, though didn’t require we use the MMU.

That is an excellent recommendation. For Operating Systems anything Andy Tanenbaum did is world class.

This made me look up what he has been up to, there is a 2023 edition of "Modern Operating Systems" which covers cloud virtualization and Android along with everything that came before, hm, tempting.

I'd suggest https://os.phil-opp.com/ instead of a book from long ago. There is no reason to drag yourself through C anymore.

And if you do want the more historical content, https://www.projectoberon.net/

I am 99.99% sure that less than 20% of Australian graduates could do this, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the actual answer is <1%.

I was studying at Monash, which is considered a solid university here, and holy moly are the standards low. I had classmates in the second year of my machine learning postgrad asking me things like "What is machine learning?", and they all graduated and found jobs anyway.

We really need a Tech Writer Hall of Fame. W. Richard Stevens, Andrew Tanenbaum, P.J. Plauger. Others?

What did they find jobs in? Australia has like one tech company.

Which is odd since their universities have built two of the most interesting CS projects I can think of (Mercury and L4). And WWWJDIC I suppose.

I'd agree with this. I did a double degree in Comp Sci/Comp Sys Eng at RMIT (1998-2002) and even from that era I would say that's largely true. Out of the people who did my course (and those I knew from other degrees like Comp Sys Eng/Business) very few are still doing deep technical programming for a career and/or hobby programming on the side on deep technical non-web things. The rest are mostly working for places like consulting companies, banks, big data, Telstra, etc in management roles like project manager, scrum master, solutions architect, change management. A lot of folks I think were just not that interested in stuff like writing an OS, how does virtual memory work, how does the hardware work, etc so they gravitated out of those software development roles into management roles. Nothing wrong with that, but I just think not everyone is interested in or capable of writing an OS!

Folks end up at all sorts of places. Like I mentioned above, the banks hoover up a lot of graduates. There are a lot of smaller local companies doing web stuff. The consulting companies all have a presence here (KPMG, Accenture, Fujitsu Consulting, etc).

Kernighan!

And how can we leave out the OG of tech writers: Donald Knuth. He got a bit distracted by developing TeX but he got a well deserved Turing award for the series.

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