Basic Operating System

By: Vinod Patel

Definition of an Operating System

An interface between users and hardware - an environment "architecture
Allows convenient usage; hides the tedious stuff

Allows efficient usage; parallel activity, avoids wastage of CPU cycles

Provides information protection

Gives each user a slice of the resources

Acts as a central control system.

Intro to Basic Operating System

Its a very elementary operating system with limited functionalities Its kernel is based on the microkernel based design.

Its programmed in various languages like C/C++, assembly and linker scripting
It supports VGA graphics

It supports GRUB chain loading

It supports filesystems like FAT32 and NTFS 4..0

Modules of Basic Operating System

Master Boot Record

Boot Loader
Kernel VGA Graphics Keyboard driver Interrupt Handler File system support for FAT32 and NTFS

Booting process of Operating System

Hardware doesnt know where the operating system resides and how to load it. It needs a special program to do this job Bootstrap loader. o E.g. BIOS Boot Input Output System. Booting of a computer starts with BIOS (Basic Input Output System), it loads the very first sector of the hard disk called MBR (Master Boot Record) also called boot loader Boot loader locates the kernel, loads it into main memory and starts its execution. In some systems, a simple bootstrap loader fetches a more complex boot program from disk, which in turn loads the kernel, like multiboot loading or chainloading.

Boot Process Cont.

Reset event on CPU (power up, reboot) causes instruction register to be loaded with a predefined memory location. It contains a jump instruction that transfers execution to the location of Bootstrap program.
This program is form of ROM, since RAM is in unknown state at system startup. ROM is convenient as it needs no initialization and cant be affected by virus. Booting video demo

Booting with BIOS

Kernel structure of BOS

Basic Operating System has a microkernel structure

Live Demo of Basic Operating System

Future vision of BOS

Support for parallel processing model Paged memory management Implementation of efficient Interrupt Handler Implementation of file system support for EXT3 and NTFS 5.0 Enhanced VGA graphics GCC Lib support

Generic drivers for Keyboard, Mouse, External storage devices

References
www.wikipedia.org www.osdev.org www.osdever.com www.brkern.com Books: The Indispensable PC Hardware