Sigh, folks give the guy a break.

Sure he doesn't know what he doesn't know, but he has decided to fix that. Which, if you know your history, is not a whole lot different than Linus back when he was calling out Minix for being crap.

The challenge here is that the barrier to speaking on the interwebs is quite low so you can make a fool of yourself if you're not careful.

Jean Labrosse, who wrote uC/OS (which everyone called mucos), in his original thesis statement made many of these exact same arguments. And like your author he made some choices that he felt were reasonable, only to learn through experience that perhaps they weren't a well thought out as he had hoped.

I am a huge fan of people just saying "How hard can it be?" and jumping in. Enjoy the ride, they can surprise you if you under estimate them.

So assuming this person notes that they are getting a ton of traffic from HN, and comes here to investigate, my three suggested books are :

Operating System Concepts [1], Operating System Implementation [2], and The Design of UNIX [3]. Preferably in that order. Any decent college library should have all three in the stacks.

[1] www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Seventh-Edition/dp/0471694665/

[2] www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementation-3rd/dp/0131429388/

[3] www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0132017997/

Agreed; the criticism here is way too harsh. In particular, I think it's somewhat amusing that people are giving him grief for wanting to "jump to C as soon as possible." Any rational kernel developer wants to jump to C as soon as possible -- and wants as much of the system to be in C as possible. (Indeed, this is the ethos that drove Unix -- and separated it from the horrifically unportable systems that predated it.[1])

Further, there are some good ideas here -- in particular, jumping directly to long mode allows one to avoid much of the replaying of the history of the PC that one is historically required to do to boot an x86. Most civilians (and I dare say, most of the negative commenters here) have NFI how ugly this process is and how much of a drag it is on future development. With the decline of the PC, it's reasonable to believe that a future is coming in which x86 becomes primarily a server-side microprocessor -- and begins to shed much of the baggage from the misadventures of the 1980s and 1990s.

All that said: there is a certain arrogance of youth here, and one hopes that when reality has sandblasted it away, the resulting humility will find its way to a formal computer science education and ultimately into professional software engineering; our discipline needs more people who have dared to write an OS from scratch, not fewer.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/cacm.html