First Ever Successful Boot!

I'm restarting a project that I tried a few years ago- to write a stand-alone forth operating system. The complexity of the x86 processor has stopped me in the past, but this time I am more prepared. Another thing that has stopped me is getting a kernel to actually boot on a real computer. I've gotten them to boot on emulators, but for some reason I could never do it on my desktop. Well, this has finally changed! I got grub2 to boot a kernel image using tutorials from osdev, where the kernel simply prints NOAH to the screen (the hello world of hobby os development seems to be to print your own name to the screen).

This is great news! All the starting up stuff has been keeping me back for a while, and I still have a lot to get worked out (interrupts, memory model, memory protection, and keyboard controlling) but now I can start actually working on it and not have that nagging worry that I won't be able to boot it even if it works in an emulator.

I am trying to keep everything simple here- there will be no restrictions to memory, it will be mono-tasking at first (forth multitasking isn't super hard, but I need something to work with first before I go there), and I don't intend to support anything but a keyboard. One major difficultly is disk access- I would like to support a block file system, possible with largish block (4KB rather than the usual 80*25 to store a screen) or maybe not, I don't know. The problem is accessing the hard disk- a possibly complex operation that I don't know anything about. I would be okay with a partition that is organized into blocks, or a file on another file system that is loaded as a full block files system- which would be really neat because I could edit it in Linux as a text file, and load it as part of the operating system. The problem of course is I don't know how to do this either.

So in conclusion- YAY! I finally started this project! Its been forever! I'm planning on using it mostly for fun, but also as a way of getting more comfortable with C, which I will be using a lot in the future. I was going to just use assembly, to take complete control of the system and make the Forth registers the actual machine registers and all that like in my previous forth system for the z80 of my ti-83 calculator, but I decided it would be easier, and possibly more instructive for me to use C to learn about using it as a systems programming language.