Click here to Skip to main content
15,860,972 members
Articles / Programming Languages / F#

Develop Your Own Operating System in C# or VB.NET

Rate me:
Please Sign up or sign in to vote.
4.94/5 (159 votes)
12 Aug 2010BSD4 min read 526.9K   317   108
Develop your own operating system using C# (or VB.NET, etc.) and Visual Studio!

Introducing Cosmos

Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System) is an operating system development kit which uses Visual Studio as its development environment. Despite C# in the name, any .NET based language can be used including VB.NET, Fortran, Delphi Prism, IronPython, F# and more. Cosmos itself and the kernel routines are primarily written in C#, and thus the Cosmos name. Besides that, NOSMOS (.NET Open Source Managed Operating System) sounds stupid.

Cosmos is not an operating system in the traditional sense, but instead it is an "Operating System Kit", or as I like to say "Operating System Legos". Cosmos lets you create operating systems just as Visual Studio and C# normally let you create applications. Most users can write and boot their own operating system in just a few minutes, all using Visual Studio. Milestone 5 includes new features such as an integrated project type in Visual Studio, and an integrated debugger. You can debug your operating system directly from Visual Studio using breakpoints.

Cosmos is available in two distributions, the developer kit (dev kit), and the user kit. The dev kit is designed for users who want to work on Cosmos itself. The user kit is designed for those who are interested in building their own operating system and doing some Cosmos work. The dev kit might be thought of as the Cosmos SDK. Most users should start off with the user kit as it is not so overwhelming like the dev kit. This article focuses on the user kit.

Writing Your First Operating System

Create a new project as you would any C# project, but select Cosmos as the project type.

Image 1

A starter project will be created. It looks very much like a standard C# console application.

Image 2

Program.cs contains the boot and execution code. Instead of seeing a Windows console window, you will see the following:

Image 3

This is your operating system running in VMWare Player! Cosmos can of course also be booted in VMWare Workstation, Hyper-V, Virtual PC, or on real hardware. But by default, Cosmos uses VMWare Player because it is both free, and reliable. Cosmos can even debug in Visual Studio, even when running on another machine.

Integrated Debugging

Debugging is a major issue with operating system development. The Cosmos team was not content enough to simply conquer building and deployment, we want to make developing operating system as easy as developing Windows applications. Debugging a Cosmos based operating system should feel very familiar to you. Let's modify our project a little bit to show the effect, and set a breakpoint.

Image 4

Now run the project again.

Image 5

Note that the execution stopped at "One"? That is because in Visual Studio, our project has stopped on a breakpoint. Simply press F5 to continue just as you would in a normal application!

In addition to breakpoints, Cosmos also supports step into (F11) as well. Trace over (F10) is not supported yet.

Debugger Communication

The debugger uses the serial port to communicate. Because of this, debugging only works with virtualization environments that support serial ports such as VMWare. QEMU supports serial ports as well, but its serial port implementation is seriously broken on Windows and makes debugging impossible using QEMU. To debug on real hardware, you must use a physical serial cable. In the future, Cosmos will also support debugging over Ethernet.

Extra Debugging

Cosmos supports some explicit methods that can be used to communicate with the debugger and use additional functionality. It is accessed using the Debugger class in the Cosmos.Debug namespace in the Cosmos.Kernel assembly. This assembly is used by all Cosmos projects.

Code Based Breakpoints

C#
Debugger.Break();

Break can be used to issue a code based break. Visual Studio will break on the line after this statement.

Image 6

Since Cosmos does not support conditional breaks in the IDE yet, code base breaks are very useful for implementing such. For example:

C#
if (x == 5) {
    Debugger.Break();
}

Alternatively, you can call the .NET class library break:

C#
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

Both functions will produce the same result.

Debug Output

Debug strings can be output to the debug window of the host. Because Cosmos does not support watches yet, this functionality can be very useful for watching variable values and for performing tracing without breakpoints.

C#
Debugger.Send("Hello from Cosmos!");

When this line is executed, it will send a message over the debugging channel and it will appear in the Visual Studio output window.

Image 7

What's the Catch?

There really is no catch. Everything I've shown here is functioning as seen. No mockups were used. However we still have a lot of work to go. Items of interest that are on our current task list include interfaces (necessary for foreach), file systems (partial support exists), threads, networking, and graphics. We have prototypes and experimentation for each, but none have been rolled into the mainline Cosmos development as of yet.

What Was That Syslinux Thing I Saw on Boot?

Cosmos does not run on Linux. A boot loader called Syslinux is used to boot Cosmos. After booting, Syslinux is not used. Syslinux is a bootloader and is not a Linux distro.

Obtaining Cosmos

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The BSD License


Written By
Cyprus Cyprus
Chad Z. Hower, a.k.a. Kudzu
"Programming is an art form that fights back"

I am a former Microsoft Regional DPE (MEA) covering 85 countries, former Microsoft Regional Director, and 10 Year Microsoft MVP.

I have lived in Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Switzerland, France, Jordan, Russia, Turkey, The Caribbean, and USA.

Creator of Indy, IntraWeb, COSMOS, X#, CrossTalk, and more.

Comments and Discussions

 
QuestionAwesom Pin
Member 876784116-Jun-15 2:54
Member 876784116-Jun-15 2:54 
GeneralWow! Pin
Member 1019373323-Apr-15 23:57
Member 1019373323-Apr-15 23:57 
GeneralRe: Wow! Pin
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu26-Jun-15 9:57
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu26-Jun-15 9:57 
QuestionRequire Cosmos Pin
zryan cs18-Apr-15 20:56
zryan cs18-Apr-15 20:56 
AnswerRe: Require Cosmos Pin
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu26-Jun-15 9:57
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu26-Jun-15 9:57 
GeneralMy vote of 3 Pin
Mic8-Aug-13 12:32
Mic8-Aug-13 12:32 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Ashutosh Phoujdar24-Jun-13 22:43
Ashutosh Phoujdar24-Jun-13 22:43 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
SagarRS10-Jun-13 21:10
professionalSagarRS10-Jun-13 21:10 
QuestionCan I show a winform directly after the boot? Pin
Hasitha_Dayarathna11-Feb-13 20:05
Hasitha_Dayarathna11-Feb-13 20:05 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
ibrahim_ragab18-Jan-13 0:50
professionalibrahim_ragab18-Jan-13 0:50 
GeneralRe: My vote of 5 Pin
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu12-Feb-13 3:30
Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu12-Feb-13 3:30 
Question[My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Member 963207717-Jan-13 23:36
Member 963207717-Jan-13 23:36 
AnswerRe: [My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Matthijs ter Woord18-Jan-13 0:42
Matthijs ter Woord18-Jan-13 0:42 
GeneralRe: [My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Member 963207718-Jul-13 5:08
Member 963207718-Jul-13 5:08 
GeneralRe: [My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Matthijs ter Woord18-Jul-13 5:24
Matthijs ter Woord18-Jul-13 5:24 
GeneralRe: [My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Connor Harries7-Oct-13 11:51
Connor Harries7-Oct-13 11:51 
AnswerRe: [My vote of 1] is this joke ?? Pin
Dan Suthar19-Jul-13 8:00
professionalDan Suthar19-Jul-13 8:00 
QuestionCan i install it as application for checking bootable cd and asking for pass on startup Pin
RAHUL7775830-Jul-12 3:50
RAHUL7775830-Jul-12 3:50 
AnswerRe: Can i install it as application for checking bootable cd and asking for pass on startup Pin
Matthijs ter Woord30-Jul-12 4:19
Matthijs ter Woord30-Jul-12 4:19 
GeneralRe: Can i install it as application for checking bootable cd and asking for pass on startup Pin
RAHUL7775830-Jul-12 4:27
RAHUL7775830-Jul-12 4:27 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Md. Rashidul Hasan Masum27-Jul-12 3:52
professionalMd. Rashidul Hasan Masum27-Jul-12 3:52 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Kim Togo26-Jun-12 23:11
professionalKim Togo26-Jun-12 23:11 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Nithin Rudraswamy21-Jun-12 2:23
Nithin Rudraswamy21-Jun-12 2:23 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
ChintanHiremath10-Jun-12 19:40
ChintanHiremath10-Jun-12 19:40 
QuestionThis is very, very, very cool! Pin
Brisingr Aerowing10-Apr-12 19:25
professionalBrisingr Aerowing10-Apr-12 19:25 

General General    News News    Suggestion Suggestion    Question Question    Bug Bug    Answer Answer    Joke Joke    Praise Praise    Rant Rant    Admin Admin   

Use Ctrl+Left/Right to switch messages, Ctrl+Up/Down to switch threads, Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right to switch pages.