Material Detail

Build Your Own Operating System is a thirteen-chapter course that takes a reader from an empty repository to a functioning x86-64 operating system. It covers the boot process from the firmware handoff through the transition from real mode to protected mode to long mode; interrupt and exception dispatch; physical frame allocation and four-level paging; a demand-grown kernel heap; preemptive multitasking and the synchronisation primitives it requires; reading from disk without a driver stack; a compositing window manager on a linear framebuffer; and the differences a reader encounters when moving from an emulator to real hardware.

The course ships alongside NexusOS, the system it builds. Every listing in the book refers to a file in the same repository, and a reader who completes the material arrives at a system equivalent to the reference implementation. The manuscript is licensed CC BY 4.0; the kernel source and build pipeline are MIT.

Prerequisites are comfort with C and willingness to read x86-64 assembly; no prior operating systems knowledge is assumed. Each chapter ends with exercises, and the system runs at the end of every chapter.

A typeset edition is sold separately, but the openly licesned repository and book are free. 

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