Resources

This page maintains a list of resources related to operating system development. Often, links become outdated or sites go down. If a link does not work, try to see if it was backed up on archive.org.

Operating System Development

Warning: External tutorials tend to be old, have bugs, don't follow current community recommendations, and often aren't community edited.

• Bonafide OS Development
• The Operating System Resource Center
• How to Write an Operating System
• Start your small Operating System in Assembly
• NeuralDK OSDev Tuts
• BrokenThorn OS Development Tutorials
• OS FAQ, overall design, VM design, threads..
• Memory Management
• Protected Mode
• [1] Circuit Cellar Ink, an embedded systems development magazine

Hardware Specifications

• Pierre's Library
• List of PS/2 documents
• ChipDB datasheet archive
• FreeMicroNix Documentation Collection

Processors

• Intel Manuals
• Processor Architecture
• x86-64(AMD64)

BIOS

• BIOS Boot Specification
• Plug and Play BIOS Specification

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 docsz
• more USB info
• USB OHCI
• USB EHCI
• OHCI for FireWire
• OHCI mirror

Software Specifications

• Banana - Use these if you want
• Ralf Brown's Interrupt List
• The Boot Process
• Partitions
• File Systems
• Executable File Formats
• Plug'n'Play Specs
• Device Driver Interfaces
• FAT12-32
• The Art of Software Security Assessment
• Art of Exploitation
• Secrets of Reverse Engineering
• Subverting the Windows Kernel

Other Specifications

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

Source Code

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

University Courses

• Advanced Operating Systems (NYU)
• Operating System Engineering (MIT) (2004) (2006)
• Introduction to Operating Systems (WISC)