I am a person who always wants to dig deep into internals, so when I started a course about complier principles at college, I wrote a compiler, well, actually it's more like an assembler. When I started to use FreeBSD, I wanted to know how it works in the rawest way, so I tried to read the kernel source. Then as you can imagine, I soon realized that it was an impossible mission to be accomplished. I was swamped with millions of lines of code. All I want is an insect killer, but H-Bomb is the only thing they could provide.

So I thought why can't I do it by myself, implement a simple OS kernel to show how it works from bootstrap to shell, finally I got Skelix. Skelix is a "skeleton" of an operation system kernel, it works in 32-bit protected mode, it demonstrates some basic concepts of how an os kernel works: bootstrap, task switching, paging, virtual memory, file system etc. in an i386 computer.

This tutorial is about how to implement Skelix step by step to show the basic idea of how a simple os kernel works. However, Skelix is still nothing but a toy kernel so far. I keep it as simple as I can to make it look clear.

Thanks for your interest in Skelix. Any bugs in Skelix, any problems with my English or any advices will be very helpful. Just drop me a mail.

Tutorial 00: Requirements

• GCC

• VMWARE

• Things are Good to Know

Tutorial 01: Bootstrap -- "Hello World!" from the dark side.

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• Memory Addressing

• Booting Process

• First Cry

• Hello World!

Tutorial 02: Protected Mode -- That's the first tough one.

• 

• Benefits of Protected Mode

• How does it work......roughly

• Entering Protected Mode

• Hello World Comes Back

Tutorial 03: Auxiliary Functions -- Fairly easy _m_(^-^)_m_

• Our Goal

• kprintf

• libcc

• print_c

Tutorial 04: Interrupts and Exceptions Part1 -- What a great pleasure to see some error messages.

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• What is Interrupts and Exceptions Anyway?

• IDT and ISR

• Divided by Zero, Yeah!

Tutorial 05: Interrupts and Exceptions Part2 -- Please forgive my poor imagination, "Hello World!" comes back again.

• 

• Timer Ticking

• Let's Get Keyboard Work

Tutorial 06: Multitasking -- One bit typo might drive you crazy, believe me.

• 

• TSS

• LDT

• Creating and Scheduling

• A & B

Tutorial 07: File System -- A long journey, but not difficult.

• 

• Accessing Hard Disk

• Disk Partitions

• File System

• root

Tutorial 08: Memory Management -- Huge Disappointment

• 

• Paging

Tutorial 09: System Call and Executing Programs on Disk -- Little relief

• 

• System Calls

• Color

Special Thanks
Pádraig Brady	He has help me to correct my terrible English. There are some really useful tips about Linux on his website http://www.pixelbeat.org.
Song Jiang	He has pointed out several bugs in my tutorial
Arshad Hussain	A calculation error has been found by him in Tutorial 02
Shen Feng	Several comments in Tutorial 04, pic_install has been in wrong position since 2006. He explains a problems relates to .bss in Tutorial 06.

Feel free to use my code. Please contact me if you have any questions.