Blog
Implementing simple cooperative threads in C
24 May 2020
Multitasking, like many services an operating system provides, is something we take for granted so much that it can feel mundane. With our powerful smartphones and computers, the idea of a computer not being able to juggle hundreds of processes feels alien. I think it’s features like this that make computers incredibly useful, but also make them feel so complicated and magical.
Read moreEmbracing modularity with Meson
08 May 2020
Almost seven years ago, I made the first commit to my very first C library. It was a personal C library – so personal that I gave it the name “libstephen”, ensuring that nobody else would ever even consider using it. And to be fair, nobody should have used it! This was a data structures library written by a kid with a few weeks of C experience and a bunch of basic Java coursework under his belt. Without getting into specifics, the code was pretty bad.
Read moreImplementing a virtio-blk driver in my own operating system
22 March 2020
In this blog post, I’m going to describe how I wrote my first block device driver in my operating system, SOS. This OS is my personal project for exploring how to implement an operating system. You can find more inforation about it in my first post about SOS, or check it out on Github.
Read moreBuild your own OS: Pre-emptive Multitasking
08 February 2020
One of my recent long-running projects has been building my own operating system. It’s called SOS, for Stephen’s OS (real creative, I know). And beyond all odds, this project has progressed really well! Recently, SOS got the ability to do pre-emptive multitasking — and it only took me 116 commits and 1.5 years of on-and-off effort to get there! Throughout that time, I haven’t really posted about SOS because it felt too complicated to write about. But I don’t want to let that prevent me from trying, so going forward, I’m going to try to post about different features and achievements with SOS. To start, this post will describe how I got pre-emptive multitasking working.
Read moreNetwork Booting Raspberry Pi 4B with Upstream Kernel
04 December 2019
This is a guide and personal documentation for how I got my Raspberry Pi 4B booted with an upstream Linux kernel. I use this setup for quickly booting custom kernels as I do development. As a result, I had the following goals:
Read moreSite Update
17 February 2019
Today I made a few changes to my site’s design which hopefully makes things a bit more user-friendly for anyone using this site.
Read moreCreating an Alien Themed Linux Greeting Card
14 June 2017
My (former) roommate is a big fan of the Alien series, especially the classic first movie, and the really awesome video game, Alien: Isolation (I guess you could say I’m a fan too!). As a goodbye gift, I thought I’d create a really odd e-card: a bootable Linux flash drive with the same boot splash as computers from the movie, sound effects from the movie and game, and programs that look like the ones in the game. Everything turned out much better than I hoped, and so I thought I’d share the method and the result in a blog post!
Read morePublic Mistakes are Cool
24 April 2017
Confession time: I’m vain. While I write a blog because I like to write and share things, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the occasional publicity resulting from a successful post on Hacker News or Reddit. I get to open up a Google Analytics tab and watch visitors enter my site. How cool is that?
Read moreLinked Lists are Still Hard
21 April 2017
Kernel development offers a set of challenges that are very different than the ones you would encounter in other types of programming. When you’re new to kernel dev, you hear from lots of sources that you’re gonna have a hard time. But for me, after some initial culture shock, I didn’t feel that uncomfortable. It still felt like user-space C programming. But a few days ago, I finally encountered that bug that made me realize, we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Read moreWireshark Tricks
12 April 2017
This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe others will find it interesting as well.
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