Best Educational Operating System For Study? [closed]

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What's the best operating system to study in order to write your own x86 operating system from scratch?

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I think Minix was created for pretty much that exact purpose.

Have fun!

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It might be difficult to comprehend the source for an entire OS all at once. The tutorials over at osdev.org have a few "bare bones" code samples to get you started.

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I just wrote my version of x86 kernel from scratch! (for my OS class project) and that was experience I couldn't probably describe. You can find valuable resources at above link.

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For my OS class in college we used the Nachos OS Project and implemented that. I did the C++ version, however I think there is also a Java port of this as well. I remember it being very interesting and learning a great deal, even though it was a lot of work.

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It all depends on how you want your Operating System to function, if you want a microkernel you should probably study Minix 3, or if you want a monolithic kernel the current linux kernel is a good place to start from (HINT: look in arch/x86/boot, there is some very interesting code in there). However I personally think that you should read through the Intel and AMD manuals, and then do a bit of reading on the osdev.org forums and wiki. They have plenty of code to study, and are generally helpful towards newbies.

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Honestly, you should probably not start with an x86 architecture, or even operating systems but maybe something like an 8-bit starter kit, like a basic Fox11 development kit. In college, I wrote my first (and only) OS in Assembly for an M68HC11 processor (the one in the kit).

If you really want to build your own OS from scratch, you've got a long road ahead of you.

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I think best way to read many different operating system sources, definitely osdev barebone tutorials, whitepapers on OS research and documentation on your target hardware.

I personally would recommend looking at l4-ka pistachio kernel, written in pretty darn good C++. There are also multiple smaller projects definitely worth checking out, like jimix or pedigree.

Best to stick around osdev forums and wiki - there is a lot of information there already answered - see http://forum.osdev.org and http://wiki.osdev.org

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I read this article a while back. You might find it interesting. This guy wrote MINIX back in the day for the very purpose of teaching OS concepts. So it would probably be a good simple OS to study. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/

However, as Martin and Cory mentioned, it's a big chunk to chew.

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There is not much point in studying obsolete OS's which is pretty much all current OS's as they tend to have long lives. Have a look at some fresh ideas (although based on tried and true) like Singularity