Somewhere in-between self-hatred and boredom I came up with the idea of writing a kernel. I don’t know if it came from interest or ego, but I decided to go through with it. With kernels there is a few languages that are applicable to this, mainly Assembly, C, C++ and Rust.
I have never written a kernel module, let alone start a kernel from scratch. So I chose the sane choice of the language with the least online resources. The project will require a ton of reading anyway, will just add to suffering, transfering c to rust and learning nuiances of Rust.
Features
During this project I have discovered a lot about computers that I did not understand. This was mostly gaps in knowledge that have been filled in through learning the underlying technology or things I had a rough understanding from school computer architecture lessons.
One thing that has blown my mind is discovering that computers aren’t 64 bit. When I discovered this I wasn’t surprised, but had never thought about it. 64 bit only supports 48 bit addresses.
I have not discovered whether it was out of self-hatred or ego, but self-hatred did come from the project and damage to my ego. My confidence did bounce back twice as much, unfortunately.
This was a bit of a drunk project for me I done most of the programming and research after coming back from the pub. This had comeback in a worse form than a hangover. After a quite heavy/healthy night of 10 pints of Guinness, I lost count and shots. I woke up with a sore head, but later realised was the least of my worries. I discovered that I had implemented paging (memory management) after coming home. I was definitely over the drinking limit of having access to a text editor, compiler and shell. I made some beautiful code I still do not understand to this day, I made some war-crimes of code that I spent the entire next day trying to fix.
There was also a poorly written note files that night trying to explain to future sober me that 64 bit is only actually 48 bit addresses :)
I called this operating system unknown_os due to me not knowing where I would take it at first, I now have more of an idea and future things I want to add. Also, I would not call this an operating system in it’s current state as it is just a kernel. I have thought about making it POSIX compliant, but am unsure because will be restrained by standards. The power of TempleOS, inspires me and think there is true genius in it’s design and development. I don’t know whether it is a shame or a beauty what happened.
Features I would like
