Great work! I'm usually bored too, sometimes I find something to study or try to implement known tech, but only give up when I feel like it's too hard for me or it's too much work haha, this motivates me a bit.
lolinder 12 hours ago [-]
To anyone else who read the Spanish version first, note that the English version is longer and has the link to download the source code!
ktbwrestler 16 hours ago [-]
Great job, something like this is also a really great way to get your foot in the door with a job when the time comes.
I like that you have the site in both Spanish and English!
Jotalea 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and since I'm planning to share this project in Hispanic communities too, it would be bad to not have my own language in it.
Though following that logic, I should also make my OS in Spanish too... I guess I could add some kind of translation dictionary, I'm not sure. I guess I'll do it in the future.
thereticent 14 hours ago [-]
I'm impressed with your dedication and also amazed that I ran into this on HN. My 9-year-old just showed me your Geometry Dash remake in Scratch. You're like a legend to him and his friends!
Jotalea 10 hours ago [-]
Whoa really?? I wonder where did he find it.. it's been a while since I've last worked on it. I think it was in 2023.. and I've never showed it too much, maybe less than 50 views?
> You're like a legend to him and his friends!
:D
layer8 13 hours ago [-]
We need more bored people.
swiftcoder 18 minutes ago [-]
Quick, someone light the UBI signal
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
We need new ideas in OS/kernel development, not reiterations of the same old (boring) ideas ...
(imho)
notfed 13 hours ago [-]
I desperately wish to be bored. (Context: I have a job)
w10-1 11 hours ago [-]
trade you?
miningape 5 hours ago [-]
The grass is always greener
p0w3n3d 4 hours ago [-]
Le agradezco a Duolingo, no necesité cambiar el idioma a inglés cuando entré a tu sitio web.
mportela 2 hours ago [-]
Great, now go back to study before Duolingo kidnaps your family
fyi, you can automatically detect the user's language and switch to English when applicable by using `navigator.language`...
...or even better, don't use JS (which doesn't work on older browsers and prevents some optimizations), and read the Accept-Language header instead
account42 2 hours ago [-]
And please do NOT do what gogle does and pretend that certain values in the Accept-Language header don't indicate a user preference and you should guess based on the IP address instead.
anandnair 5 hours ago [-]
Website is not working?
ranger_danger 17 hours ago [-]
How can we download only the source code?
Jotalea 15 hours ago [-]
The source code comes in a bundle that includes a compiler, an emulator, and some extra tools. While I don't see an advantage on downloading the source code alone, I won't deny it.
Just note that there are three different "branches":
- stable: This is the one being distributed in the website
- neofetch: This one exists because I couldn't get the ASCII art to fit within 512 bytes along with the rest of features
- multistage (untested): Here I'm trying to work with jumps in memory to handle different commands and features (and include them all in one release). I read online that I can compile them separately and then merge the binaries to get jumps to work. But I haven't finished it, and it probably won't compile as it is right now.
Out of curiosity why don’t you put the source code on github?
12 hours ago [-]
gtirloni 16 hours ago [-]
Nice accomplishment. I usually do things because I'm excited about something :)
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
Copado, cuales son sus dependencias?
imcritic 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
krylon 15 hours ago [-]
Respect! This is really cool!
asdf0987 15 hours ago [-]
despite saying it's open source, there's no link to read source code e.g github.
ranger_danger 14 hours ago [-]
why do you think that is a requirement to being called open source?
freedomben 13 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a project claiming to be "open source" provide the source code in some form. It needn't be on github (GP merely sites Github as an example), but there should at least be a link of some kind, whether a zip file or a git remote or something. It's not a requirement, but it is something that most people (reasonably IMHO) expect.
Jotalea 10 hours ago [-]
Probably it was hidden too deep (switch to English mode, scroll down to Downloads section and download the Dev Kit), I'll try to fix that tomorrow, or whenever I can.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
but there is a link
>Dev Kit includes distribution of a cut down QEMU x86_64 emulator, ASM compiler and source code, along with extra utilities. These are packaged with a win32 platform in mind.
martzy13 14 hours ago [-]
I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement, But when I think open source - I usually think about being able to browse the code in some type of repository, in a human readable format.
I like to browse a codebase in some way that I don’t have to download and unzip an unknown set of files.
MonkeyClub 5 hours ago [-]
> I don’t know that GitHub per se would be a requirement
Indeed.
Although providing a browsable source tree is convenient, we shouldn't default that on Microsoft's private platform (which, after all, monetizes the code stored there by using it for LLM training).
If a project is free software or open source, Codeberg.org is an excellent solution, while there exists a whole host of other web git hosts as well.
Let's take advantage of the field's diversity, lest it narrows down on us abruptly.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
I understand you prefer to be able to browse the code online, and that does seem to be largely the norm with most projects, but from a technical/legal perspective, my understanding is that the only actual requirement is that source code is provided if requested, they don't even have to post it anywhere on the Internet in advance. It could just have been emailed to you or something. But people usually put a link up somewhere just to make it easier.
nom 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, open source never meant you must provide an online repository in perpetuity for everyone.
It means you can get the code if you want it. If you have to pay for postage so someone can send you a floppy with the source code, it's still open source. It's open to you.
account42 2 hours ago [-]
More importantly it means once you have the code you can then give it to others both with and without modifications.
seanw444 14 hours ago [-]
Open source != provided source control repository
Karellen 10 minutes ago [-]
I think that's debatable. Many open source licenses have a definition of accessible source code that is similar to:
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work
for making modifications to it.
Certainly, in the past "a tarball of the source for whatever version you have" was absolutely considered sufficient for that. But these days the features provided by source control systems, such as "annotate"(/"blame"), "bisect", etc... could very well be argued to have raised the baseline for what "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" should mean.
colesantiago 15 hours ago [-]
Nice job, keep it up!
Jotalea 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks :)
heyyfurqan 6 hours ago [-]
Awesome!
caspper69 16 hours ago [-]
The page isn't in English, but Google helpfully translated it for me.
Without source, and only those commands available, it's kind of difficult to see what you've implemented and how far you progressed.
Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection? Do you ever jump to a user space context?
Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
Like Groundhog Day, I have been doing this over and over and over for the last 25 years.
So many toy kernels, so many ideas and tests and watching A's and B's and C's and D's flash on the screen. Memory dumps. Writing executable loaders. Poring over the Intel/AMD manuals (and later AARCH64). ACPI (ugh). Trying to implement the techniques from the latest papers (usually in an effort to maximize the performance of a microkernel-ish design).
It's all great fun of course, so I'm not lamenting that, but when you start to get to the userspace infrastructure, unless you're YOLO'ing it with libc and POSIX compatibility, everything is so opinionated, and there's SO MUCH TO BUILD, I just kind of peter out.
It's been about 18 months or so since I last had the itch, but it's inevitable that I'll do it all over again.
Best of luck!
gazook89 15 hours ago [-]
Immediately after the opening header there is a button to switch to English, fyi.
Jotalea 15 hours ago [-]
There actually is a Switch to English button at the top of the screen, which of course translates the whole website to English, and adds more details that I know English-speaking people would be interested on (for example, the source code), while Spanish-speakers won't. And even if they are, they have a note saying "for more details, check the English version of the site"; and I'm sure that if they can understand those details, they can also understand English.
> Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection?
No, not yet. I still have to learn that
> Do you ever jump to a user space context?
I mean, I haven't put any restrictions, just as I haven't put many features that I would consider user space.
> Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
I saw a video about TempleOS, and got motivated to make my own OS from scratch. Of course, TOS is a ~15 years-in-work project, while mine has been just a couple days/weeks, these are very far from each other.
I guess my final goal with it would be to get Minecraft running? I don't know, getting a Java program (or Java itself) to run on an OS from scratch sounds too complicated for me.
My current goal is to get Bad Apple on ASCII to show up on this, but to do that I need to save a lot of variables, one for each frame, and there being ~6000 frames, it would take a huge lot more than 512 bytes, so I would need to get jumps in memory to work so I can have these many variables set, which is what I would be working on now, if I hadn't other stuff to do.
> Best of luck!
Thanks :)
4ggr0 48 minutes ago [-]
why are spanish-speaking people not interested in source-code?
what about bilingual people, do they have an average amount of interest for the source-code?
caspper69 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I didn't notice the site switch to English link; If I had seen it, I might have also seen the source, lol. Sorry about that.
Terry Davis, the author of TempleOS, was fairly well known online. He had a lot of struggles psychologically, and met an unfortunate end a few years ago. It's an interesting case, but I honestly wouldn't take too much from the project. He was a gifted developer, but he did things for reasons that were decidedly non-technical.
For building up your knowledge (you can't only read the reference manuals, after all), there's a ton of resources online, but a particularly good one is the OSDev wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page. I can't speak for it as it exists today because I've been out of the game for too long, but it was maintained by helpful folks. I didn't check to see if the forums are still up, but there used to be a wealth of information in them back in the day too.
As a note, relying on BIOS is ok, but the whole write a bootsector in 512 bytes to switch to 386 protected mode, to then switch to long mode (64-bit) is kind of outdated (the modern computer boot process is handled by the UEFI firmware, and by the time your OS binary is loaded, the CPU is already in long mode with paging enabled and setup with a flat linear mapping of physical memory).
Not to say that the method/approach is worthless (it's all learning), it's just that you spend an awful lot of time doing things in the whole mode-switching dance that are basically tossed in the bin almost immediately, and most of it has nothing at all to do with OS development. UEFI at least allows you to start on the real meat & potatoes without spinning your wheels on code that isn't going to stick around very long.
Jotalea 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the information :)
I just analyzed and did what I read online and it seemed to work.
To be honest, I don't fully understand how these things work, but I'm here to learn ;)
iwontberude 16 hours ago [-]
Congratulations are in store but of course you are a special kind of person to escape boredom this way. It’s a gift and a curse. Good luck!
Jotalea 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks ;)
jmkni 9 hours ago [-]
lol well done :)
Jotalea 9 hours ago [-]
thx
anastyabd 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nikolay 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
k1kingy 7 hours ago [-]
I have 2 young kids, some of the best advice I've been given is that it's a good thing if your kids are occasionally bored.
Why? Because it forces them to problem solve and on most occasions they get pretty creative. I'll often get home from work and there will be a massive blanket fort through the living room, or some kind of obstacle course in the front yard.
Being bored is not a bad thing!
I know kids who have lived on iPads/TV/other devices from a young age, and they don't understand the concept of being bored and watching them try to grasp the concept of 'make believe' is downright painful.
And don't get me started on not being allowed to feel proud! Who hurt you?
fjjjrjj 8 hours ago [-]
Feelings come and go. They aren't who you are, just a part of you.
You are welcome for 3 years of therapy in two sentences.
OP, way to funnel your energy into your project. Nice work!
miningape 5 hours ago [-]
As long as it doesn't push into apathy and arrogance I don't see an issue with feeling proud or being motivated by boredom
osrec 10 hours ago [-]
Why?
pshirshov 12 hours ago [-]
It's not actually an OS, it's more like a simple stub from osdev, a simple program running on bare metal.
noone_youknow 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone has to start somewhere, and many who try don’t even get this far (I’m not sure I would have at OP’s age either).
veltas 8 hours ago [-]
Got to agree, not to knock OP for sharing this because this is a fun hobby project, but to most people this doesn't meet even loose definitions of OS.
I'd say this is a bootable environment or something.
To be an OS it would have to have some way to run programs as well.
https://johv.dk/blog/bare-metal-assembly-tutorial.html
And that's all that matters for a hobby project. Congrats!
https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd...
Find a copy on your favorite shadow library.
I like that you have the site in both Spanish and English!
Though following that logic, I should also make my OS in Spanish too... I guess I could add some kind of translation dictionary, I'm not sure. I guess I'll do it in the future.
> You're like a legend to him and his friends!
:D
(imho)
...or even better, don't use JS (which doesn't work on older browsers and prevents some optimizations), and read the Accept-Language header instead
Just note that there are three different "branches":
- stable: This is the one being distributed in the website
- neofetch: This one exists because I couldn't get the ASCII art to fit within 512 bytes along with the rest of features
- multistage (untested): Here I'm trying to work with jumps in memory to handle different commands and features (and include them all in one release). I read online that I can compile them separately and then merge the binaries to get jumps to work. But I haven't finished it, and it probably won't compile as it is right now.
That said, here is the source code for all of them: https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/wB9kfq1umxW2
edit: fixed missing newlines
Out of curiosity why don’t you put the source code on github?
>Dev Kit includes distribution of a cut down QEMU x86_64 emulator, ASM compiler and source code, along with extra utilities. These are packaged with a win32 platform in mind.
I like to browse a codebase in some way that I don’t have to download and unzip an unknown set of files.
Indeed.
Although providing a browsable source tree is convenient, we shouldn't default that on Microsoft's private platform (which, after all, monetizes the code stored there by using it for LLM training).
If a project is free software or open source, Codeberg.org is an excellent solution, while there exists a whole host of other web git hosts as well.
Let's take advantage of the field's diversity, lest it narrows down on us abruptly.
It means you can get the code if you want it. If you have to pay for postage so someone can send you a floppy with the source code, it's still open source. It's open to you.
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
Certainly, in the past "a tarball of the source for whatever version you have" was absolutely considered sufficient for that. But these days the features provided by source control systems, such as "annotate"(/"blame"), "bisect", etc... could very well be argued to have raised the baseline for what "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" should mean.
Without source, and only those commands available, it's kind of difficult to see what you've implemented and how far you progressed.
Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection? Do you ever jump to a user space context?
Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
Like Groundhog Day, I have been doing this over and over and over for the last 25 years.
So many toy kernels, so many ideas and tests and watching A's and B's and C's and D's flash on the screen. Memory dumps. Writing executable loaders. Poring over the Intel/AMD manuals (and later AARCH64). ACPI (ugh). Trying to implement the techniques from the latest papers (usually in an effort to maximize the performance of a microkernel-ish design).
It's all great fun of course, so I'm not lamenting that, but when you start to get to the userspace infrastructure, unless you're YOLO'ing it with libc and POSIX compatibility, everything is so opinionated, and there's SO MUCH TO BUILD, I just kind of peter out.
It's been about 18 months or so since I last had the itch, but it's inevitable that I'll do it all over again.
Best of luck!
> Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection?
No, not yet. I still have to learn that
> Do you ever jump to a user space context?
I mean, I haven't put any restrictions, just as I haven't put many features that I would consider user space.
> Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?
I saw a video about TempleOS, and got motivated to make my own OS from scratch. Of course, TOS is a ~15 years-in-work project, while mine has been just a couple days/weeks, these are very far from each other.
I guess my final goal with it would be to get Minecraft running? I don't know, getting a Java program (or Java itself) to run on an OS from scratch sounds too complicated for me.
My current goal is to get Bad Apple on ASCII to show up on this, but to do that I need to save a lot of variables, one for each frame, and there being ~6000 frames, it would take a huge lot more than 512 bytes, so I would need to get jumps in memory to work so I can have these many variables set, which is what I would be working on now, if I hadn't other stuff to do.
> Best of luck!
Thanks :)
what about bilingual people, do they have an average amount of interest for the source-code?
Terry Davis, the author of TempleOS, was fairly well known online. He had a lot of struggles psychologically, and met an unfortunate end a few years ago. It's an interesting case, but I honestly wouldn't take too much from the project. He was a gifted developer, but he did things for reasons that were decidedly non-technical.
For building up your knowledge (you can't only read the reference manuals, after all), there's a ton of resources online, but a particularly good one is the OSDev wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page. I can't speak for it as it exists today because I've been out of the game for too long, but it was maintained by helpful folks. I didn't check to see if the forums are still up, but there used to be a wealth of information in them back in the day too.
As a note, relying on BIOS is ok, but the whole write a bootsector in 512 bytes to switch to 386 protected mode, to then switch to long mode (64-bit) is kind of outdated (the modern computer boot process is handled by the UEFI firmware, and by the time your OS binary is loaded, the CPU is already in long mode with paging enabled and setup with a flat linear mapping of physical memory).
Not to say that the method/approach is worthless (it's all learning), it's just that you spend an awful lot of time doing things in the whole mode-switching dance that are basically tossed in the bin almost immediately, and most of it has nothing at all to do with OS development. UEFI at least allows you to start on the real meat & potatoes without spinning your wheels on code that isn't going to stick around very long.
I just analyzed and did what I read online and it seemed to work.
To be honest, I don't fully understand how these things work, but I'm here to learn ;)
Why? Because it forces them to problem solve and on most occasions they get pretty creative. I'll often get home from work and there will be a massive blanket fort through the living room, or some kind of obstacle course in the front yard.
Being bored is not a bad thing!
I know kids who have lived on iPads/TV/other devices from a young age, and they don't understand the concept of being bored and watching them try to grasp the concept of 'make believe' is downright painful.
And don't get me started on not being allowed to feel proud! Who hurt you?
You are welcome for 3 years of therapy in two sentences.
OP, way to funnel your energy into your project. Nice work!
I'd say this is a bootable environment or something.
To be an OS it would have to have some way to run programs as well.