[HN Gopher] Show HN: MyraOS - My 32-bit operating system in C an...
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Show HN: MyraOS - My 32-bit operating system in C and ASM (Hack
Club project)
Hi HN, I'm Dvir, a young developer. Last year, I got rejected after
a job interview because I lacked some CPU knowledge. After that, I
decided to deepen my understanding in the low level world and learn
how things work under the hood. I decided to try and create an OS
in C and ASM as a way to broaden my knowledge in this area. This
took me on the most interesting ride, where I've learned about OS
theory and low level programming on a whole new level. I've spent
hours upon hours, blood and tears, reading different OS theory
blogs, learning low level concepts, debugging, testing and working
on this project. I started by reading University books and online
blogs, while also watching videos. Some sources that helped me out
were OSDev Wiki (https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page), OSTEP
(https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP), open-source repositories
like MellOS and LemonOS (more advanced), DoomGeneric, and some
friends that have built an OS before. This part was the longest,
but also the easiest. I felt like I understood the theory, but
still could not connect it into actual code. Sitting down and
starting to code was difficult, but I knew that was the next step I
needed to take! I began by working on the bootloader, which is
optional since you can use a pre-made one (I switched to GRUB
later), but implementing it was mainly for learning purposes and to
warm up on ASM. These were my steps after that: 1)
I started implementing the VGA driver, which gave me the ability to
display text. 2) Interrupts - IDT, ISR, IRQ, which signal to
the CPU that a certain event occurred and needs handling (such as
faults, hardware connected device actions, etc). 3) Keyboard
driver, which enables me to display the same text I type on my
keyboard. 4) PMM (Physical memory management) 5) Paging
and virtual memory management 6) RTC driver - clock addition
(which was, in my opinion, optional) 7) PIT driver - Ticks
every certain amount of time, and also 8) FS (File System)
and physical HDD drivers - for the HDD I chose PATA (HDD
communication protocol) for simplicity (SATA is a newer but harder
option as well). For the FS I chose EXT2 (The Second
Extended FileSystem), which is a foundational linux FS structure
introduced in 1993. This FS structure is not the simplest,
but is very popular in hobby-OS, it is very supported, easy to set
up and upgrade to newer EXT versions, it has a lot of materials
online, compared to other options. This was probably the
longest and largest feature I had worked on. 9) Syscall
support. 10) Libc implementation. 11) Processing and
scheduling for multiprocessing. 12) Here I also made a shell
to test it all. At this point, I had a working shell, but
later decided to go further and add a GUI! I was working on the FS
(stage 8), when I heard about Hack Club's Summer of Making (SoM).
This was my first time practicing in HackClub, and I want to
express my gratitude and share my enjoyment of participating in it.
At first I just wanted to declare the OS as finished after
completing the FS, and a bit of other drivers, but because of SoM
my perspective was changed completely. Because of the competition,
I started to think that I needed to ship a complete OS, with
processing, GUI and the bare minimum ability to run Doom. I wanted
to show the community in SoM how everything works. Then I worked
on it for another 2 months, after finishing the shell, just because
of SoM!, totalling my project to almost 7 months of work. At this
time I added full GUI support, with dirty rectangles and double
buffering, I made a GUI mouse driver, and even made a full Doom
port! things I would've never even thought about without
participating in SoM. This is my SoM project:
https://summer.hackclub.com/projects/5191. Every project has
challenges, especially in such a low level project. I had to do a
lot of debugging while working on this, and it is no easy task. I
highly recommend using GDB which helped me debug so many of my
problems, especially memory ones. The first major challenge I
encountered was during the coding of processes - I realized that a
lot of my paging code was completely wrong, poorly tested, and had
to be reworked. During this time I was already in the competition
and it was difficult keeping up with devlogs and new features while
fixing old problems in a code I wrote a few months ago. Some more
major problems occurred when trying to run Doom, and unlike the
last problem, this was a disaster. I had random PFs and memory
problems, one run could work while the next one wouldn't, and the
worst part is that it was only on the Doom, and not on processes I
created myself. These issues took a lot of time to figure out. I
began to question the Doom code itself, and even thought about
giving up on the whole project. After a lot of time spent
debugging, I fixed the issues. It was a combination of scheduling
issues, Libc issues and the Qemu not having enough (wrongfully
assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough). Finally, I worked
throughout all the difficulties, and shipped the project! In the
end, the experience working on this project was amazing. I learned
a lot, grew and improved as a developer, and I thank SoM for
helping to increase my motivation and make the project memorable
and unique like I never imagined it would be. The repo is at
https://github.com/dvir-biton/MyraOS. I'd love to discuss any
aspect of this with you all in the comments!
Author : dvirbt
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-10-26 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hey, what an amazing project, bravo!
|
| i would suggest to providing an iso or co-operating / looking
| into copy.sh which provides a large number of iso files which you
| can boot/play around with in the browser itself!
|
| I was just today tinkering around with the ibm iso (exploring
| ibm) and others too, its always fun seeing new operating system!
|
| I would love if you could, as I said, co-operate with copy.sh/v86
| team to also include your iso and also provide iso files in
| github releases if possible
|
| Source: https://copy.sh/v86/ Their github page :
| https://github.com/copy/v86
| userbinator wrote:
| _wrongfully assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough_
|
| If I were you I'd investigate why it needs so much. Keep in mind
| how much functionality older OSs had, and how much computing
| power they needed. Always good to see more OS projects
| nonetheless, but always remember that efficiency is important.
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