ArabOS design decisions 1

Design decisoins is something that SW developers do when they program. But OS design decisions have a big influence that one decision can remove and add thousands or even millions of lines of code. Anyway this article is mainly about the design decisions of ArabOS and what I did choose and a rationale.

The first decision is to use a premade bootstrap loader, or a custom one. I read that for new OSs it is better to use a premade loader so one can focus on the development of the system rather than reinventing the wheel. Although I have made the bootstrap loader a long time ago, I decided to use GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader). It makes so many things for you. It supports Multiboot, loading from a CD or a flobby. It initialyzes 32-bit protected mode for you. It also queries the BIOS for the reserved memory areas.

The second decision is to use GCC or MSVC. Well, I didn't choose; I tried. Some stuff didn't work with MSVC, especially the multiboot support thing, and special functionality only provided by the linker script of GCC(LD). So I had to move to GCC, since having problems from that early stage, what whould happen after a long time ? (Also GCC have support for OS development)

The third one is to use NASM or GAS. After trying, especially I am not professional in GAS, I had to do stuff in NASM (long jmp didn't compile with GAS, I don't know why). I am using most of the asm files as NASM, but I am intending to move to GAS later.

Next is to develop under Linux or under Cygwin. Actually, Cygwin is PAIN. I can't use ELF file format which prevented me from linking my kernel to run in the upper 2 GB VM (Thanks to GRUB which didn't understand PE file format). But I used Cygwin because I used VMWare. Now using Bochs which run under Linux, I can move to Linux anytime. But I'd rather after a while.

After that paging VS segementation; Upper half VS lower half; has predefined answers. Paging and Upperhalf. Search for them.

C VS C++. Well, C++ in an un-hosted environment is a pain. I have to make the runtime support my self, not even the whole thing. So using C99 is actually fine and comfortable as long as I don't need namespaces, templates, and non-singleton classes.

VGA VS Text-Mode. Text mode. There is tons of VGA drivers out there, XServer+KDE will do it all.

Monolithic VS Microkernel VS Exokernel. In the current phase of development, I am going for monolithic cause of simplicity. Later I can switch to Micorokernel. I don't think Exokernel is an option.

Single or mutiple platforms. Not now, it's too early, so I'd go for single. Same for multiple CPU support.