Resources

This page maintains a list of resources related to operating system development.

Operating System Development

• Bran's Kernel Development tutorial
• Bonafide OS Development
• The Operating System Resource Center
• John Fine's Home Page
• Write Your Own Operating System
• How to Write an Operating System
• NeuralDK OSDev Tuts
• Shunya OS Development
• TAJ OS Development
• BrokenThorn OS Development Tutorials
• OSDCOM
• Kernel 101
• The OsLib
• OS FAQ, overall design, VM design, threads..
• Memory Management
• Protected Mode
• MIT OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.828 Operating System Engineering, Fall 2006 Complete with lectures, lab notes, and assignment work.

Hardware Specifications

• Pierre's Library
• Ace OS 'specifications' page
• stockpile of hard-to-find datasheets

Processors

• Intel Manuals
• Intel IA-32 Manuals
• Processor Architecture

Motherboard Devices

• PIC, PIT, DMA, RTC, ..

Human Input Devices

• Serial Mouse
• Human Interface Devices
• PS/2 mice
• PS2 mouse driver

Video

• official VESA & VBE website

Storage

• official ATA working group
• another ATA/ATAPI website, includes reference driver
• an introduction to ATA/ATAPI commands. It contains a couple of ASM examples to read sectors and identify drives.
• Disk and Disc Drives
• collected links about Ultra DMA, on ATA drives and how PCI configuration comes.

Audio

• Sound Devices

Network and Communication ports

• Serial and Parallel port, SPP, EPP, ECP
• Networking Devices
• RTL8139 family datasheets

Buses

• Interconnect Buses
• official USB developers docs
• more USB info
• USB OHCI
• USB EHCI
• OHCI for FireWire
• OHCI mirror

Software Specifications

• Ralf Brown's Interrupt List
• The Boot Process
• Partitions
• File Systems
• Executable File Formats
• Plug'n'Play Specs
• Device Driver Interfaces

Other Specifications

• stockpile of technical documents (partly in Russian)
• Legos, ATX, NetPC's..

Source Code

• Miscellaneous Code
• OSD Code Snippet Index
• stockpile of documents at singlix.org
• a reference implementation for malloc()

Sample Kernels

• Kernels documented in the wiki

Small Kernels

• OSD Kernels
• PM Kernels
• Selection from Bonafide
• DennisOS
• BOS
• LibOSDK
• LSE/OS
• DegenerateOS

Larger Kernels

• BCOS
• Tabos
• Mobius
• Cosmos
• Clicker
• MenuetOS
• Daidalos
• BlueIllusionOS
• Agnix Kernel
• SolOS
• Minix 3
• AMOS
• OSKit

Non-hobby Kernels

• Linux
• OpenBSD
• L4

University Courses

• Advanced Operating Systems (NYU)
• Operating System Engineering (MIT)