Retroactive Log – June 14th (Reconstructed from memory and commit logs)

These are a series of retroactive logs, meaning I developed this and wrote this log before I had a Hackaday account, so I'm posting these here now. These logs almost fully cover my journey making this OS before I created a Hackaday account. A general overview of this project, and some additional info about my journey creating this OS, like what inspired me, can be found on this blog post.

I followed Arjun Sreedharan's tutorial to get MooseOS booting in QEMU. After completing it, I was able to enter VGA text mode and display “Hello World”—a pretty big milestone. Shortly after, I tackled keyboard interrupts, implementing an IDT and a keyboard driver so I could type letters onto the text-mode display.

The hardest part wasn’t the tutorial itself, but setting up the development environment. Building MooseOS on an M1 Mac posed difficulties because I didn’t have the necessary i386 binutils pre-installed. I had to track down the right ports and make sure everything matched the target architecture. Luckily, NativeOS’s i386-elf toolchain worked perfectly on my computer, letting me compile and link my code successfully.