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by lobster_johnson 3468 days ago
Andrew Tannenbaum's Minix [1] was pretty much made for this purpose. The current version is no longer a "teaching OS", but there is a lot of documentation on earlier versions around, including the original 1987 book [2] that Tannenbaum wrote on operating systems (which comes with the Minix source code).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Systems:_Design_an...

2 comments

Minix3 is designed to be usable as a real system, but the core of it is still only supposed to be 6kLOC.
I have the book but I haven't finished it yet. Will I come out having written a full kernel by the time I'm done?
No, it's not a tutorial, which I don't think would make sense. Rather, it's a walk through the design and implementation of Minix. Minix is tiny, so you can actually follow along. In theory, by the time you're done you'll not just know Minix, but you'd be able to write your own kernel if you wanted to.