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Recent Articles
- Spam is not an effective e-marketing strategy!
- Homosexuals granted right to apply for asylum
- Alpha Course poll says there is no god
- Extortionate immigration fees & gratuitous hurdles
- Should I use a physical or virtual memory model?
- Atheism and morality
- Identifying installed floppy drives
- Russian Knights of Spamalot!
- Migrating my web presence to this site
- The importance of experimental observation
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OS Development Archive
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Should I use a physical or virtual memory model?
Posted on September 9, 2009 | No CommentsOne of the most important considerations for your OS kernel is memory management. For all but the very simplest of environments, your kernel is going to need memory allocation and deallocation (free) facilities. This, of course, means carving off a “chunk” of memory each time... -
Identifying installed floppy drives
Posted on September 4, 2009 | No CommentsIf you’re implementing support for floppy drive controllers in your hobby OS kernel, then one of your first tasks is to identify what floppy drives are installed in the system. This is pretty easy to do, as we can interrogate the system configuration to find... -
Detecting when a floppy disk is changed or missing
Posted on August 30, 2009 | No CommentsIn a floppy disk controller device driver, we can check if a floppy disk has been changed or is missing by telling the controller to select the drive and switch it’s motor on, then checking if the DISK CHANGE bit is asserted in the Digital... -
Enabling paging vs. the GDT “wrap around” trick
Posted on August 29, 2009 | 1 CommentWhen writing our standalone code for the OS nucleus or kernel, one of the first problems we have to deal with is the difference between our linked addresses (i.e. the load addresses defined by the linker) versus the actual address we are loaded at by... -
Creating VirtualBox (VDI) hard disk images on OpenSolaris
Posted on August 29, 2009 | No CommentsWhile testing my hobby OS nucleus (kernel) code, it is sometimes useful to be able to create disk images containing a file system and any files I need that I can then load into a virtual machine. One of the virtual hosts I like to...