[akkartik]

I'm curious about the hardware it runs on, and didn't immediately find answers on Google. Could you talk about what hardware is on a usual system and what device drivers need to do for screen, serial port, disk drives, etc.? Does the CPU use floating point?

The reason I ask: for the past six months I've been dipping my toes in OS development for x86 with BIOS, SVGA and ATA interfaces: https://github.com/akkartik/mu And I'm way out of my depth. I have this suspicion that x86 might be one of the more difficult environments for device drivers, so I'm curious to hear what other hardware looks like.

[halfer53]

I agree, X86 is too complex with its legacy hardware and obscure instructions and environments. It might not be a good starting place to develope hobby projects.

The OS is running in a customised RISV hardware in MIPS for educational purposes, you can read more here https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1275462.1275470 The simulator https://github.com/halfer53/rexsimulator

The BIOS has already been written for the serial ports, etc. So it is quite easy for me to interact with the devices in the OS.

[akkartik]

This is really cool, to the extent that I'm surprised I've never heard of it. Are universities still using it in coursework?

[halfer53]

Yeah they are still using to teach computer systems and operating system course

[ori_b]

It's also by far the best documented and most consistent hardware out there, especially when it comes to configurations. Yes, it's grotty -- but at least you can figure out where the gunk is.

[lovelyviking]

How hard would it be to run it on RaspberryPi ? (let's say RaspberryPi 400, the one that is within keyboard case)

[grishka]

https://s-matyukevich.github.io/raspberry-pi-os/