How hard is it to create a functional operating system?

[akram03]

I was just wondering, how hard is it to create a fully functional OS from scratch where all the drivers also work and it can boot successfully. I don't mean an edited version of Linux, I mean a full one made from scratch, what is required and how hard is it?

[Levent]

if you wanna go ahead and start from pretty much bare metal, you gonna be learning assembly, so yeah pretty damn hard.

[Ausfernando]

18 minutes ago, akram03 said:

I was just wondering, how hard is it to create a fully functional OS from scratch where all the drivers also work and it can boot successfully. I don't mean an edited version of Linux, I mean a full one made from scratch, what is required and how hard is it?

It’s basically like building a house by yourself with no blueprints 

[it_dont_work]

8 minutes ago, Ausfernando said:

It’s basically like building a house by yourself with no blueprints 

With the added problems of a badger in your pants, and not the cute kind the angry kind 

[WereCatf]

27 minutes ago, akram03 said:

I was just wondering, how hard is it to create a fully functional OS from scratch where all the drivers also work and it can boot successfully. I don't mean an edited version of Linux, I mean a full one made from scratch, what is required and how hard is it?

It's literally years of hard work.

[Granular]

Depends on how many features and what hardware compatibility you aim for.

Ditch complicated stuff like graphical interfaces, audio, user management and focus on working on one architecture in a limited virtualised environment and a single capable dev could probably whip up something that's not terrible in a few years.

[DocSwag]

If you don't know the answer to that question, you probably are not anywhere close to being capable of creating one. Just sayin'.

[Fleetscut]

check out http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

 

but if you mean from the beginning, without any pre written code then you would need a very good knowledge on cpu and memory architecture. There was a youtube series i was watching a long time ago where someone was explaining how to get a basic "hello world" os going. cant remember the name of the channel

[Graham Carter]

You could apply the same question to pretty much any complicated system

Take for example a car... you would have to mine your own raw materials, then figure out how to create glass, rubber, metal etc

 

 

Still an interesting thought process :-)

 

[wasab]

10 hours ago, akram03 said:

I was just wondering, how hard is it to create a fully functional OS from scratch where all the drivers also work and it can boot successfully. I don't mean an edited version of Linux, I mean a full one made from scratch, what is required and how hard is it?

hard enough that most people dont bother. you can start by coding for the minix operating system if you wanna learn. coding from scratch though? you can be the next bill gates if you are successful in creating something that even remotely works. 

[Sauron]

Creating something that boots isn't that hard, and no, you don't need assembly - you can use C or really any other compiled language (though you may lose performance the higher level you go). If you add POSIX system calls and a decent scheduler you may even be able to run some gnu utilities on it, which is not too shabby. Going farther than that is probably too much work for a single person and if you think you can write a competitor to linux by yourself you're wrong, but for personal interest it's definitely a cool project.

 

Drivers are another matter entirely and, depending on what you intend to support, it may not be feasible by a single person outside of extremely generic I/O drivers and basic video output.

On 7/9/2018 at 3:12 PM, Levent said:

if you wanna go ahead and start from pretty much bare metal, you gonna be learning assembly, so yeah pretty damn hard.

Linux is written in C for crying out loud...

On 7/10/2018 at 1:39 AM, wasab said:

hard enough that most people dont bother. you can start by coding for the minix operating system if you wanna learn. coding from scratch though? you can be the next bill gates if you are successful in creating something that even remotely works. 

Coding something that would be considered functional in the early '80s was much easier than it would be now, and to be the "next Bill Gates" even back then would have taken a lot of luck (which Gates and Allen themselves benefitted from). It's not that hard to make something that "works", it's much harder to make something that is marketable.

[Koeshi]

If you are interested in that sort of thing then you might want to check out Redox: https://redox-os.org/

 

Its a project that has been going for a few years with the goal of writing a whole OS in Rust.  Last I checked it was more or less working on certain hardware and in VMs, but don't expect to be able to use things like wifi.

[jde3]

Gates bought the OS from Seattle Computer Products .. so if you want to be like Gates have a rich dad.

 

If your interested in OS's check out the Illumos project.

[Sceptic]

22 hours ago, Sauron said:

Linux is written in C for crying out loud...

There are 1325 assembly language files in the kernel tree, and over 900 instances of inline asm calls. So no, it's not written in C - it's written in a mixture of C and assembly language. Most of that is probably optimisations, but almost certainly not all.

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, Sceptic said:

There are 1325 assembly language files in the kernel tree, and over 900 instances of inline asm calls. So no, it's not written in C - it's written in a mixture of C and assembly language. Most of that is probably optimisations, but almost certainly not all.

The vast majority of it is C and you could definitely get it to work in pure C, it would just be slower and missing some architecture specific features. 900 inline calls are nothing compared to over 10 million lines of code, and even if those files contained an average of 1000 lines of assembly (just... no) they would amount to less than 10% of the source... if you want an example of a working operating system that at one point was purely written in C look no further than UNIX.