I think people are being overly pessimistic. It's not that ambitious of a project (particularly a hobby project at that). Why? Well, he doesn't have to support thousands of different drivers and hardware configurations -- he only needs code that supports his own. That eliminates a good chunk of the OS code.
Second, a lot of grunt-code can be found in open source projects, so most of the tedious/time-consuming programming can be eliminated if he chooses to follow this option.
Drop preemptive multitasking, cache-optimization, modes, virtual memory, and networking and there's not too much left.
And finally, it doesn't take that long to understand the GDT. Mine became corrupted once so I took a day to learn how it worked -- fixed that crap in a hex editor.
So no, he's probably not going to invent the next highly polished OS that handles every edge case and has been rigorously tested against bugs, but then again I don't think it's unreasonable to see a simple little functional OS.
As someone who's just started on a less ambitious OS project, I couldn't agree more. I'm writing basically exclusively for legacy hardware because I'm not expecting to run it outside of QEMU, but one of the reasons Linux took so many man hours to write is because it runs on everything while maintaining stability. If you recall, Linus started writing specifically for his own machine and everybody hopped on the wagon for their own.
Second, a lot of grunt-code can be found in open source projects, so most of the tedious/time-consuming programming can be eliminated if he chooses to follow this option.
Drop preemptive multitasking, cache-optimization, modes, virtual memory, and networking and there's not too much left.
And finally, it doesn't take that long to understand the GDT. Mine became corrupted once so I took a day to learn how it worked -- fixed that crap in a hex editor.
So no, he's probably not going to invent the next highly polished OS that handles every edge case and has been rigorously tested against bugs, but then again I don't think it's unreasonable to see a simple little functional OS.