The Little Book about OS Development

This book is a practical guide to writing your own x86 operating system. It is designed to give enough help with the technical details while at the same time not reveal too much with samples and code excerpts. We’ve tried to collect parts of the vast (and often excellent) expanse of material and tutorials available, on the web and otherwise, and add our own insights into the problems we encountered and struggled with.

This book is not about the theory behind operating systems, or how any specific operating system (OS) works. For OS theory authors recommend the book Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum. Lists and details on current operating systems are available on the Internet.