Symmetry

There is no point, in my opinion, trying to develop a 32-bit operating system at this time. The x86 platform is not worth the development time anymore, because I’ll just have to port it to 64 bit in the future. Therefore, I am dropping support for 32-bit, and am moving to 64.

Pretty much every computer you can buy these days has a 64 bit processor, and even though they can run in real or protected mode, what’s the point of getting stuck with limited memory access and so on anyway.

I fixed a problem with global objects today. Now I should be able to get some interrupts going.

EDIT: Revision 19 is in - the GDT is now loaded - I think….

EDIT: I fixed a problem where each new global object was being overwritten today. I just had to make some very simple heap management. It’s fixed in Revision 20.

You can grab the source (as usual) from our SVN repo.

I upgraded the site to the newest version of WordPress today. It has a few more cool features, and should make the site faster.

I just committed Revision 17 of SoS into the SVN repository.. Here’s what’s changed:

I added a lot of features to the text mode handler - now you can have different colours and newlines, and the display can now scroll.

SoS can now switch into Vesa modes - I had some VBE switching code in my old OS, which I have ported. I don’t intend to make a GUI or window manager just yet though - I want a really solid base (with multitasking, disk access, application loading support etc.) this time before I start on that.

I’ve also just started working on setting the GDT, and then I’ll be able to start on interrupts.

You can grab the code over at our Google code site.

-Stephen

I have started rewriting the kernel in C++ now. I have also made a new Google Code project for SoS. I had to use the name s-os because sos was already registered on Sourceforge.

Anyway, the kernel is very very simple at the moment, and only displays a line of text. Once I have got the runtime support for global objects working, I will be able to implement some basic iostream functions (like cout and cin). Next, I’ll add the GDT table and interrupts, and then some basic memory management - like paging and heap management. Then I’ll be able to extend the runtime support, to support the new and delete operators. Next, I’ll probably start a VFS and make a ramdisk, and then I’ll probably look at starting floppy support.

Anyway, if you want to have a look at what I’ve done so far (not much at the moment) then head over to the Subversion repo

Instead of making a microkernel, I’ve decided to re-write SoS in C++. It will be object oriented, and a lot cleaner. You will also be able to download the source code from the Google Code project, in the SVN repository.