OSDev.org

Here are a few suggestions for new members and guests -- feel free to comment.
We have a wiki for Frequently Asked Questions !

It stands at http://www.osdev.org/osfaq2/. The big banner on the top points to it just click it ... It contains many goodies and gets updated/extended frequently.


Have a question about hardware ?

Please, before you post a question about hardware, make sure you bookmarked OS Resource Center and Bona Fide development page. These sites are full of very valuable informations, and will prevent you to receive a rough "try a google search" response

Of course, you can't dare to start without a copy of the System Programming Manual from Intel on your desktop

Note that googling for hardware information will return much more accurate information if you specify "filetype:pdf" in your search...

Have a question about OS design techniques ?

Check out the tutorial section of Bona Fide, and the FAQ about writing your operating system, and more specifically,
[0] the How To ... category,
[0] the Trouble Shooting category and
[0] the hardwhare infos category.



Don't know where to start ?
First, you don't have to start with a bootsector. You can nowadays easily let GRUB do that for you.

If, on the other side, you're looking for general advice like "where to start", "using what tools", "what language", etc. you could check the introduction section of the FAQ, of course, featuring exclusive interviews of Nick Stacky, James T. Klick and Lino Comando ;D

You can also head yourself to So, You Want to Write an Operating System or Climbing the Kernel Mountain articles submitted on OsNews.com (thanks fly to Brian a.k.a. Rock who Searched the F** Web for us )

Another good-to-read-first document is the OS Design document from alt.os by Alistair J. R. Young.

Need some debugging help ?
Remember that we're not bound to any S.A.V. contract, nor do we have the response to every bug. Make sure you provide enough informations about your situation and that you give us the needed listings to help you (though giving a link to 300K zip of your project is unlikely to help

If possible, make an OSID card as soon as possible, providing enough technical informations so that it is possible to focus on solving your problem, and not trying to guess out what is your environment.

How to Search this forum ?
The 'search button' doesn't work that well. You can use the Google-power, though: e.g. searching site:mega-tokyo.com USB will give you everything related to USB we have here. If you are annoyed by multiple reference to the same thread, add "Print Page" to your search and use the cached results.

How to Ask Questions ?
For all the newbies and first-timers here, we kindly suggest you spend a few minutes on "How to Ask Questions" to improve your chances to get useful info from kind people ...

in a nutshell,
* Identify Yourself
* Use a meaningful thread title.
* Don't be lazy
* Check the FAQ: it's the memory of collected knowledge and experience on this board for over 5 years!
* Give all the information needed
* Give only the information needed
* Make your post easy to read

It all comes from reading the "How to ask questions the smart way article Even though it may sound like a rude advice, it will save you from "fighting" with people that get the feeling you ask stuff because your a looser or whatever.


See the FAQ-extension for more links suggestions

a few brainstorming threads have been started, more focused on design issues than on 'OS helpdesk' ...

topics:

• file systems, and more about filesystems
• components programming (started by smurf975),
• wanted features (started by Therx),
• Device programming in microkernels (started by BeyondInfinity),
• Real-time Scheduling (and other scheduling issues)
• How did you/will you implement your GUI (started by Candy)

[*]A MegaTokyo Community OS ? (started by Viral).
[*]Universal (Simple) File System

basic BOCHS troubleshooting (survival kit)

• running in bogus memory: you sent your code pointer (eip) to some uninitialized memory area. This means either you followed a null/uninitialized pointer, or damaged the return address of your stackframe. Make your code more clean, test pointers before you follow them, initialize every pointer, especially those who are on the stack, and enable -Wall.
• tripple fault: the CPU didn't manage to invoke an exception handler. This is probably due to a bad IDT register content, or a bad IDT descriptor. Sometimes (but less frequent), it can also be due to a severe bug in an exception handler code. Check your exception works with things like 'idiv 0', or 'push 0xf001; pop ds; mov ax, [ds:0x12345678]'
• i/o operand size: BOCHS performs some paranoiac checks on I/O operand size. reading a byte from port 0x1234 is usually *not* the same thing as reading a dword. Go back to your chip's datasheet and check your size are correct.

that's all i can find so far.

if you're still stuck, what i can suggest you is to download the BOCHS sources package and search for the message you received. Then, maybe you can add extra information in the message (like the faulty offset of a segfault, the segment limit, etc), but keep away from modifying bochs's operations.
Everytime i suspected a bug in bochs, i was just misunderstanding the Intel Manual.


In big trouble, you may consider turning to a debugger-enabled version of BOCHS or make use of special I/O debugging ports

The post is about the old Mega-Tokyo based FAQ which is going away

Old OSfaq Mirrors:

• Clicker32 Document Section (Pype.Clicker) (OLD VERSION)
• CJmovie's CHM version
• Drake Technologies (Dragon_Hilord)

===If you desire to have your mirror added/removed/renamed/etc. to/from/etc. this list, PM me so I can make the update.===

Cheers, DH.

[1/5/06] First version. 4 link entries added. Fixed my link.. and Solar's
[1/15/06] Second version. 0 link entries added. Now a .tar.gz (my mirror claims a .zip ). Updates to occure monthly from now on.
[3/6/06] March Break ^_^. 0 link entries added. Somewhat late update, don't bother the OSfaq staffers about it, and don't bother me. It's a zip again
[4/19/06] Blame me. I'm a slacker. I'll get everything up to date briefly
[5/20/06] I got the links updated and such.

I noticed the 'tutorial section' and 'OS design' URL point a bad address: osdev.neopages.net.
When click on them i get error message: Problem loading page...

I think that was one of the old addresses for osdever.net. They've had a bunch over the years. It'll get fixed soon because everything is going to get moved into the new wiki.

1)Operating Systems design and implementation
2)Design of the unix operating system
3)Design of an operating system an haberban
3)Linux Kernel Development - Robert Love
4)Design and implementation of 4.4 free bsd
5)The Free Dos kernel
6)Dissecting Dos
7)Understanding the linux kernel
Writing Linux device drivers
9)Writing dos device drivers
10)Making a 32 bit Os -MMRUTL ...

(It 's a lot difficult to make an os -- the poor chap in(10) has made his
own compiler ,assebler and os! ...See it's very easy to critsize...)

Could some mod please remove the rootdirectory.de link from the mirror list above? Even when I was much more active here I didn't find the time to update the archive regularily, and by now it must be months old...

Removed the link, I also de-stickied the thread. Once the new wiki settles down a little I'll recreate it but in it's current form it's probably as confusing as it is helpful.