| > RTL8139 network driver (WIP) It's good to have support for real networking hardware, but consider virtio-net as well. A lot of VMs support it and it's more streamlined. 32-bit x86, bios boot means doing a lot of things for compatibility with systems that were old enough to drink before you were born... skipping to simplified virtualized interfaces wherever possible makes a lot of sense; even if your OS can run in 16 MB of ram, you're probably not going to run it on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM and a real parallel IDE drive ... at least not at first. You can always come back and make that work if you want... deferring tricky things until later so you can work on the fun stuff keeps you having fun and engaged with your project. Also, consider trying to get your OS running on v86. It's fun having your hobby OS work in a browser. The biggest limitations I've run into are 32-bit x86 only, single processor only; but those might not be that big of a deal... looks like your OS is also 32-bit x86 only, and I don't see anything about SMP in your project. If there's anything missing from v86 that you depend on, I've had a wonderful experience with submitting PRs; copy often reworks my patches to be much better before applying them, which I always appreciate rather than a back and forth attempt to get me to make it better :) I've also seen copy (and others) take reported issues and fix them, if you've got a problem that you can't write a patch to resolve. > Real hardware support is still a work in progress. I ran into a fair amount of issues with 16-bit code; qemu doesn't check segmentation limits but real hardware does. Real hardware would crash, but it worked fine in qemu. My kernel is multiboot and I use 3rd party bootloaders, but I do SMP, on x86, that involves starting the Application Processors in 16-bit real mode and then moving them into 32-bit modes, but you have to do the segmentation dance correctly until you get there; doesn't help when qemu just lets you do whatever. :P PS 12 hour days are a lot; hope you're getting all your other stuff done :P |
virtio-net makes a lot of sense for VM testing - I'll look into implementing that alongside the RTL8139 driver.
v86 is a really cool idea, having Aurion OS run in a browser would be amazing for demos. I'll definitely explore that.
And yeah, the 12 hour days were intense but honestly I was having so much fun I barely noticed haha. School still gets done though :)