Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

The Learnix Operating System

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein

Hello there!1

In this book we are going to write and learn about operating systems together!

We are going to implement an entire POSIX compliant OS in Rust and not use ANY2 external libraries. All of the thought process, code and implementations will be explained and documented here as well as in this repo which all the code snippets are from.

Note: ALL the syntax highlighting of the Rust code is custom and created by me! If you see any bugs, please write in the comments or submit an issue.

Base Knowledge

This book will be technical, and will assume a little bit of a programming knowledge background, but not necessarily in Rust.

If you are not coming from a low level programming knowledge that's fine!

Just make sure you know this stuff or learn it as you read. Also, if in any place of this book I take some things for granted, please, open an issue and let me know so I can explain it better.

Some base knowledge that you will need to have:

  • Some assembly knowledge. (just understand simple movs and arithmetic operations at a very basic level3)

  • Some knowledge on memory. (what's a pointer, what's an address)

  • Knowledge in Rust is not that important, but knowing at least one programming language is. I myself have some more learning in Rust, and in this book I will also explain some great features that it has!

  • A lot of motivation to learn and understand because it is a complex subject.

Roadmap of this book

  1. Compiling a standalone binary

  2. Boot loading, Debugging, stages and some legacy stuff

  3. Important CPU modes and instructions

  4. Paging, writing our own malloc

  5. Utilizing the Interrupt Descriptor Table

  6. File systems and Disk Drivers

  7. Thinking in terms of processes

  8. Writing a shell

  9. Running our first program! (Which of course will be Doom)

  10. To be continued (Hopefully a virtualization section and loading a VM of another OS)

  1. Definitely not a star wars reference ↩

  2. Only libraries that remove boilerplate code will be used (And obviously be explained). ↩

  3. This is only relevant to the starting stages and some optimizations, and probably a day of learning will be enough ↩