[toast0]

I think there's value in exploring operating systems and environments. And, it's very useful to note that you don't need to do both at the same time. This strikes me as an unneccessary worry though:

> The main reasons is the difficulty in developing robust low-level systems like file systems, the large number of processors you may want to support, and also creating or porting a huge number of device drivers. At this point Linux for example supports a huge number of devices (of course you could use some sort of compatibility layer).

As a start, you simply don't need to support all of this, and you don't even need to aspire to support it all. Support virtio versions of the relevant hardware class and try to run on reasonable hypervisors. Support one or two physical devices of the relevant hardware class to run on a real machine.

If you can plugin to an existing driver abstraction and pull in external drivers, great. NDIS is one option there.

If your OS is interesting, you can figure our the driver situation, and the cpu architecture situation. It would sure be neat to run on a raspberry pi, but only running on x86 isn't a big limitation.

[zzo38computer]

> I think there's value in exploring operating systems and environments. And, it's very useful to note that you don't need to do both at the same time.

Although they can be done separately, I think there is also a value in doing both together, since the design can be made to work with both together better. Furthermore, they can be designed together with the hardware as well, to work together all three better.