Chapter 14 — Terminal Line Discipline and a Kernel Monitor

Chapter 14 — Terminal Line Discipline and a Kernel Monitor
This entry is part 14 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

At this point our kernel has enough machinery to become interactive: Now we will build two new layers: The terminal line discipline turns raw keyboard characters into editable input lines. It handles: The kernel monitor is a small command loop: This is not user space yet. It is still a kernel thread. But it gives

Chapter 13 — Mutexes, Semaphores, and a Console Lock

Chapter 13 — Mutexes, Semaphores, and a Console Lock
This entry is part 13 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

In Chapter 12, we added wait queues and blocking keyboard input: Now we need synchronization primitives that ordinary kernel code can use. This chapter adds: A mutex provides mutual exclusion: only one thread may hold the protected resource at a time. OSDev describes a mutex as a mutual-exclusion mechanism, similar to a binary semaphore, used

Chapter 12 – Wait Queues and Blocking Keyboard Input

Chapter 12 – Wait Queues and Blocking Keyboard Input
This entry is part 12 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

In Chapter 11, we added the first blocking primitive: That gave the scheduler a way to remove a thread from the ready queue until a future timer tick. Now we need a more general primitive: This is the foundation for real kernel I/O. A keyboard reader should not spin like this: It should block: This

Chapter 11 — Blocking Primitives, Sleep Queues, and Scheduler Hygiene

Chapter 11 — Blocking Primitives, Sleep Queues, and Scheduler Hygiene
This entry is part 11 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

In Chapter 10, we added timer-driven preemption: Now we need the next scheduler capability: blocking. A runnable thread competes for CPU time. A blocked or sleeping thread does not. OSDev describes a blocking process as one that waits for an event, such as a semaphore or message, and is removed from the active scheduling queue

Chapter 8 – Moving the Heap onto Virtual Memory

Chapter 8 – Moving the Heap onto Virtual Memory
This entry is part 8 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

In Chapter 6, the kernel heap still depended on low identity-mapped physical pages. That worked as a bootstrap step, but it tied the heap to the first 16 MiB of RAM. In Chapter 7, we added a real VMM and proved that the kernel can map and unmap pages anywhere the page tables allow. That

Chapter 6 — Building the First Kernel Heap

Chapter 6 — Building the First Kernel Heap
This entry is part 6 of 38 in the series Writing A Linux Style Operating System From Scratch

In Chapter 5, we enabled paging with a simple identity map: That gave us a working paged kernel, but not yet a comfortable way to allocate variable-sized objects. The physical memory manager gives us whole pages: But kernel code usually needs smaller objects: So this chapter builds the first kernel heap. We will keep it