17
qookie
7y

!rant
I'm developing an OS. I tried running it on the laptop that's on the ground. Everything works fine except text mode. There is no output when running it in text mode(not the high resolution one shown on image). Since the OS sends all data that is printed to the first serial port I might as well read the output from the serial ports. Since the laptop I use for development doesn't have any serial ports I had to use the older Windows 98 PC. For unknown reasons I could not get any output from the serial ports so I gave up.
tl;dr I wasted some time trying to debug my OS.
Image of my debugging setup(taken with the latest potato).

Comments
  • 3
    Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down!
  • 4
  • 2
    @dev-nope you got me here
  • 0
    @qookie sorry about that, just thought it could lighten your mood a bit :)

    Hope you figure it out tho!
  • 1
    This reminds me of when I wrote my own OS kernel a few years ago. Some of the most interesting bugs I've encountered were from OS development.

    I recommend giving your project another try, you learn the most from challenging problems like these.

    As for your debugging problem, I'd recommend running your OS in Bochs. It's a VM software geared towards OS dev, and has some pretty good debugging facilities.
  • 0
    @Gogeta70 i didnt give up on the whole project- just the debugging on real hardware
  • 1
    Retro flows through my body when looking at that picture
  • 0
    @qookie Yeah, I can't imagine the difficulties they faced 30-40 years ago when they could only debug on real hardware.

    Have you looked at Bochs at all? VirtualBox also has some built in debugging capabilities that many people are unaware of, though I like Bochs better.
  • 0
    @Gogeta70 I have looked at Bochs but prefer qemu. When using qemu you can connect to it with gdb and debug it that way
  • 0
    @qookie Oh yeah, forgot qemu could do debugging stuff too. So have you made any headway with your text mode issue?
  • 0
    @Gogeta70 not really. I suspect grub is passing an invalid framebuffer address
  • 0
    @qookie I don't recall ever using a framebuffer address from Grub, but it's been a long time since I've done any OS dev. You probably have found this already, but it was a really good resource for me. Maybe it'll help.

    http://wiki.osdev.org/VGA_Hardware
  • 0
    Very good :)
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