raspberry-pi-os VS circle

Last but not the least, learning by doing is fun so you can check out - raspberry-pi-os (writing an os from scratch) - https://github.com/s-matyukevich/raspberry-pi-os

CheesecakeOS for Raspberry Pi Volume 0: Booting, Processes, and Virtual Memory is the first in what I hope is a series of github markdown tutorials or volumes on bare-metal from-scratch operating system development.

I have dreamed of contributing to the Linux Kernel, but have yet to find the courage to jump in and do so. I started by attempting to read Understanding the Linux Kernel by Daniel Bovet and Marco Cesati, but found it was too advanced for me at the time. I found another text I credit with advancing my understanding, Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randall Bryant and David O'Hallaron. I worked on the self-study labs from their book website, and found them to be a superb educational tool.

Further, then becoming interested in what creating an operating system actually means, I stumbled upon Sergey Matyukevich's Rasberry-Pi-OS github repo (https://github.com/s-matyukevich/raspberry-pi-os). I wanted to expand on his tutorial, for my own education, and, in the best case, for the benefit of others.

There are many ideas taken from Linux in the implementation, as when I didn't know how to proceed, that is the source I would consult. Though, I attempt to simplify and explain the details in the text. The implementation stops short of implementing or supporting a file system, the subject of the next volume.

Not familiar with this myself but aiming to start soon. Have found a nice youtube series for low level development on the RPi, not sure which version he uses, but reportedly it works for some on RPi 4. He also has a subreddit:

Here's one tutorial: https://github.com/s-matyukevich/raspberry-pi-os

C: Learning operating system development using Linux kernel and Raspberry Pi

If you're a developer and feeling adventurous, you can also try building it yourself. The source is all on GitHub. It uses the circle-stdlib project (which is circle plus some additions to support much of the C and C++ standard libraries) as a submodule; hopefully I've set that up correctly, but you could always clone that separately and place it in the MiniScript-Pi folder. Check out circle's build instructions for info on setting up your toolchain. (Mac users: be careful with the configure script, which does not work properly on MacOS; find me on Discord and I'll help you fix the script or configure manually.)

I suggest checking out circle https://github.com/rsta2/circle since it's basically a library for the pi hardware. I'm doing some experiments with it myself now.

You can also run a Pi without an operating system, programming it in C or C++ probably. See for example: GitHub - rsta2/circle: A C++ bare metal environment for Raspberry Pi with USB (32 and 64 bit)

BMC64 is VICE in a trenchcoat unikernel / bare-metal framework called Circle: https://github.com/rsta2/circle

It uses the circle library (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) to provide a minimal runtime (mainly to interface with the hardware).

I experimented with circle the other day (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) Looks promising, and most likely within your knowledge of C/C++ development.

Natively would be amazing but a vast amount of work.

The way Apple moved classic MacOS from 680x0 to PowerPC was to write a tiny kernel emulator, with an API to run native stuff on the metal, and run more or less the whole OS under emulation, profile it and just translate the most speed-critical bits.

That's a lot of work for a FOSS project but given the performance delta between 1980s 680x0 and 2020s ARM, total emulation of the whole thing should be perfectly fine. It's how the PiStorm Amiga upgrade works.

https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

So all I envision is something like Aranym:

https://aranym.github.io/

... running on top of Ultibo, say:

https://ultibo.org/

Or maybe Circle:

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

Circle is a C++ bare metal programming environment for the Raspberry Pi.

The only other reasonable option would be to port it to a new platform which is popular that has a few well documented hardware interfaces so as not to create a hellish nightmare writing drivers. Maybe then you could do a one-off port to that platform (though you might have to re-target the HolyC compiler to target it instead if it is not x86_64). The Raspberry PI seems like a decent option here since there is already a baremetal C++ library supporting USB, keyboard, mouse, sound, video, and as an added bonus UART, I2C, SPI, GPIO. You would have good code examples for porting all the necessary drivers. But obviously this would still be a lot of work and the compiler would need to be re-targeted and user space adapted for running on ARM. That being said backwards compatibility is strong, ARM seems actually interested in keeping it that way (at least for now). The library I'm talking about is here: https://github.com/rsta2/circle