Blaze O.S.

A fast, hobby operating system for x86 PCs.

This README file and the extras folder are not part of the original source code. They have been added for the convenience of the reader.

NOTE: This version of the O.S. is kept for historical reasons only.

Development began in late September or early October of 2013. Verson 0.1.0 was last modified on 13 November 2013 at 06:52:16 pm. Some edits were made to kernel.c, idt.asm and irq.c later on, the purpose of which are unclear now.

The kernel has been renamed multiple times. Once it was 'Inspiration' as in the comments. For a full list of features see extras/CHANGES.md.

Features in v0.1.0

• Prints out what is typed on PS/2 Keyboard. Handles newline, space, tab and backspace. Scrolls the screen when output reaches the last line.

• Prints out PS/2 Mouse movement data (wrongly) as Keyboard presses.

Building

These tools are required for building the O.S.:

• Compiler: GCC (gcc, ar, ld and objcopy) with i386 binary target.

  • GCC on a GNU/Linux distro.
  • MinGW on Windows.
  • DJGPP on DOS (or 32bit Windows).

• Assembler: NASM.

Read extras/BUILD.md for more information.

Running on a Virtual Machine

This O.S. has been tested on Bochs, QEMU and VirtualBox.

Both QEMU and Bochs support floppy images of any size. Just configure the O.S. image as a regular floppy disk. A light skim through the documentation should tell you how.

VirtualBox seems to need exact sized floppy images. The O.S. image should be padded at the end with zeroes to a size of exactly 1440KB. This can achieved on Linux like so:

dd if=/dev/zero of=padfile bs=1 count=PADSIZE
cat boot.img padfile > floppy.img

Where PADSIZE is 1474560 - 'Size of boot.img'. (1474560 is the number of bytes in 1440KB.)

This should do it on Windows:

fsutil file createnew padfile PADSIZE
copy /B boot.img+padfile floppy.img

Note that fsutil, being a command that does more damage than just create blank files, requires Administrator Privileges. You might need to install Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10 and above to run fsutil. But you can just run the Linux commands then.

Running on a Real Machine

Warning: Writing a raw binary file to a storage device makes it's previous content unreadable by conventional methods. Make sure to back up the contents before proceeding.

To run this version on a real machine, you need a floppy drive and disk. Write the O.S. image to the first sectors of the floppy. Any bootable device, like a USB flash drive or even a hard disk should work too.

Next, go into the BIOS boot menu and boot from the storage medium with the O.S. image.

I'm not going to explain how you write raw sectors to a storage medium here. If you truly wanna try it, you should be able to find that out yourself.