Neppit

Operating Systems

What are your thoughts on OS dev?

http://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page

I feel like OS dev is a very niche area of programming. Outside of Windows, OSX, Linux, and some BSDs, it doesn't seem like there is too much going on. Maybe this seems like a lot, but three of those are very similar from a UX viewpoint.

Part of the problem here is probably having to do everything from scratch all the time. I wonder if this might be due to C/C++. Maybe a combination of Rust and Cargo could make this easier. I'd like to experiment with OS design in the future, so maybe I'll look into this further.

If an OS design didn't really align with existing operating systems, I wonder how this would interact with Rust's crate ecosystem. If the Rust stdlib for your target were missing something that a library needed. I guess that you would create a stub for it and have some sort of compile-fail attribute whenever it is used. Not exactly ideal, but I think anything else would be too difficult.

Another problem is probably all of the proprietary hardware. I imagine that writing drivers is difficult, although maybe Linux makes this easier. I'm not sure about graphics cards though.

Maybe developing an OS to work in a hypervisor would simplify this.

>>36
I think that the graphics driver situation is probably better now than it was a few years ago. Intel Integrated Graphics and AMD graphics cards have open source drivers available. NVIDIA has Noveau, although the proprietary drivers are significantly better.

>>35
>If an OS design didn't really align with...
It seems like the Rust stdlib is minimal enough that operating systems should be able to support everything it has without too much trouble.

I always hear good things about DragonFlyBSD, so I've been thinking about reading its source. People specifically talk about Hammer, the filesystem for DragonFly.