Developing kernels and testing them in virtual machines

Question

I like programming challenges, and writing a kernel seems a programming challenge.

Unfortunately, kernels are particularly hard to test because they are basically th

Answer 1

The first question that you need to ask yourself is what hardware architecture are you targeting? I'll assume for the sake of this discussion that you are targeting the IA_32 architecture, which would probably be a wise choice as there is plenty of readily-available documentation on that processor.

If you're truly serious about this undertaking, then you will definitely want to run your debug/code/build/deploy cycle against an emulator or VM. Someone mentioned BOCHS, which is very popular. If emulation speed is your thing, there is also an emulator called Qemu that is faster than BOCHS.

I'd suggest that your development environment run under Linux or Windows, which again would probably be a wise choice due to the available documentation for those dev environments.

Make is your friend. Use it to automate the build/execute process. I'd advise you to pick your toolsets/compilers up front, and spend some time learning them well. It will save you in the long run.