Design and Implementation of an Operating System For IA-32 Processors

Abstract

An operating system is a set of software components that are used to manage the shared hardware resources between multiple programs, while maintaining an abstract interfacing layer to devices. This work discusses the approaches used to design the different components of such complex system, and how they are related to each other to construct layers for simple user programs to work in a secured system that is fair in sharing the CPU time and other hardware resources. Our work presents first the theory and the background on memory management, interrupts, multitasking and modes of execution. Then it describes how these components are implemented in our operating system named CyanOS, and explains how to setup Intel 32bit processer’s features and some other hardware buses and devices. At the end, it illustrates the way to how to modify and extend the functionality of the kernel, and how to write and compile a program running on this operating system.