When I started self-studying kernel development via MIT 6.828 (2018)’s open source materials (JOS OS), I thought I was making my life easier by not starting from scratch. Doing this allowed me to get going very quickly with a base skeleton for an OS, as well as a fully functioning build system and helper Makefile command for debugging with qemu.

That was great, but I’ve realized that there are also many ways I’m doing this on hard mode:

• Doing it in only 2-3 hours a week
  • This is not really enough time to develop an OS, and is particularly hard for debugging, where it can be helpful to have significant context built up for longer sessions.
• Live-streaming almost all of it
  • This can be very distracting and make me go at a slower pace than usual, since I try to engage with viewers and answer questons. On the other hand, explaining things helps solidify my understanding.
• Working with a 6 year old code-base, but using a newer toolchain — which means fighting bitrot
  • There have been multiple cases where the codebase actually got in my way and produced very hard to debug bugs. Also, when I transition labs, it introduces a bunch of foreign code that I don’t understand. It can be difficult to tell if I truly have something broken, or if the new code is in an intermediate state that is meant to yield issues like crashes or assertion failures.