OSDev Wiki

What It Is

A community-maintained wiki covering bare-metal OS development from the ground up. Covers bootloading, protected mode setup, GDT, IDT, paging, keyboard drivers, VGA text mode, memory management, and everything else you need to go from nothing to a running kernel.

What It’s Good For

• Getting started fast. The “Bare Bones” tutorial gets you to a bootable kernel in an hour.
• Specific how-to articles. “Setting up the GDT”, “Creating an IDT”, “Paging” — each article is practical and focused.
• Interrupt tables. The IRQ and exception reference pages are more readable than the Intel SDM.
• Community knowledge. Edge cases and pitfalls documented by people who’ve hit them.

How I Used It

Essential companion to the Intel SDM while building MiniKernel. When Vol. 3A’s GDT explanation felt abstract, the OSDev GDT article gave me the concrete C struct layout and load sequence. The “Interrupt Service Routines” article saved hours of debugging IDT handler alignment.

Caveats

• Quality varies by article — some are excellent, some are outdated or incomplete
• A few articles have subtle bugs in example code (especially the older ones) — always cross-reference with Intel SDM
• Very x86-focused; less coverage of ARM or RISC-V bare-metal
• Not a substitute for understanding why things work — pair with the SDM and OSTEP

Verdict

Invaluable for kernel development. Start here; verify with the Intel SDM.