Welcome abord. It's not the MOST active communtiy, but losethos and i are here.

Yep

*wave*

Ok, so ctimko can come too.

@losethos,
do you think that you could make a general tutorial for creating a simple 64bit OS and bootloader? Despite my having been here a while, and despite having created a simple DOS, I am still largely ignorant of almost everything having to do with operating system level development. You seem to be very knowledgeable, and I would just like a guide. I would also like if you could explain the terminology in the guide... I know it's a lot to ask... I will understand if you don't want to do it.

@ctimko,
I just checked out your website, and I have to say that I like the nice clean layout.

I originally wrote mine as a DOS or FreeDOS application that assembled with TASM. DOS or FreeDOS run in real mode. Therefore, nothing stops you from changing to protected mode and doing an OS.

My OS today, now assembles and compiles with myt own tools and I have boot loaders.

My first bootloader was for floppies. Floppies are ancient, now.

In other words, people can't follow my footsteps because some things have changed. I'd have to find a new path they could follow. I don't know anything about gcc or Microsoft tools. I could talk about Borland's TASM on FreeDOS. What I'd like to talk about is using LoseThos to make a new operating system, but I don't think people would like that.

I do have some tutorials in LoseThos for various things.

Here's a compiler tutorial:
http://www.losethos.com/code/MiniCompiler.html#l199

Here's a graphics library tutorial:
http://www.losethos.com/code/MiniGrLib.html#l1

There are many tutorials you can see from within LoseThos -- how to do PCI interrupts, switch to user mode, page tables... LoseThos doesn't use them, but I put them there as tutorials for others.

You can use the LoseThos bootloaders. They are public domain.
HardDrive: http://www.losethos.com/code/BootHD.html
CDROM: http://www.losethos.com/code/BootCD.html


As for changing to 64-bit, you can study the start-up code for LoseThos. The bootloaders load this in at 0x10000 and it begins in real (16-bit) mode, calls some BIOS routines to get a memory map and switch to VGA mode. It switches to protected (32-bit) mode and finally to 64-bit.

http://www.losethos.com/code/OSStartUp.html

I'll think about doing a tutorial.

That is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. I have been going through a lot of books and learning a lot. Alot of stuff about BeOS, ASM, general computer theory, and C. From what I have seen, there are a bunch of theory books and very few pragmatic resources. Fortunately, there are pragmatic people

Thx for the help!

Also, please don't get angry if I ask a lot about your code in the near future.

Hi, guys.

Though this forum isn't very active at the moment, we have been working on some tutorials.

If anybody would like read or write access to them then I will grant that.

@Ford:
Thanks for the review I haven't really put as much time as I would like into it yet, but soon, hopefully really soon, I will have another graphical revision (to clean up some of the graphics some more) and finish fixing up the Wordpress Template, then get all the other links working on the portal.. :_d