Building a Simple Operating System

What is the OS:-An Operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer program.

Introduction

This is a simple guidance of showing how to implement an OS using Assembly language to show hardware information of a computer. In this article this task is performed in Linux based OS called Ubuntu. This OS can be bootable through floppy disk, CD Rom & USB.

Pre-Requisites for Creating OS

We need to gain Basic knowledge of assembly language.

This task is performed in Ubuntu.So below mentioned tools should be installed to coding.

1. NASM Installation — This tool can be installed using terminal in Ubuntu following code.

sudo apt-get install nasm

2. mkisofs Installation -This is to generate a CD-ROM ISO image of OS

sudo apt-get install cdda2wav cdrecord mkisofs

3. QEMU — This is an emulator and this is to run .flp/.iso file that we needed.

sudo apt-get install qemu

File Containing the OS

• programs/ — Source code for programs added to the disk image.
• source/ — Contains the entire OS source code.
• source/bootload/ — Source to generate BOOTLOAD.BIN, which is added to the disk image when building.
• source/features/ — Components of dilu OS(keyboard and screen).
• source/kernel.asm — The core kernel source file, which pulls in other source files.

CODE

You can find the full source code from this link.

dilusha07/dilu_os-master

Build the OS

To build the OS open the terminal in the folder which contain the source files of the OS and enter the following code.

sudo bash ./build-linux.sh

Run the OS

To run the OS open the terminal in the folder which contain the source files of the OS and enter the following code.

sudo qemu-system-i386 -soundhw pcspk -drive format=raw,file=disk_images/diluos.flp,index=0,if=floppy

This is how “dilu OS” looks like:

References:

Hands on to Operating Systems

JOSH - Operating system tutorial