Operating Systems on Artur Rios Lab

Anvil OS: An Operating System From Scratch

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:00:00 +0000

An open source operating system built from scratch.

Overview

The idea is to build a fully functional operating system, to learn about how an operating system works, and from the simpler version of a kernel, improve it until something really usable.

Roadmap

Start with the simpler version of a kernel
Build functionalities on top of the kernel
Improve as we test

Technology stack

An operating system has almost no stack in the usual sense: there is no runtime, no standard library and no framework beneath it, because it is the thing those normally run on. The choices that matter are the language, the processor architecture, how the kernel gets loaded, and the tools for running and debugging a kernel that cannot print an error when it crashes. The background for all of it is in Operating Systems and Processors.

Processes and Threads: What They Are, Where They Came From and How They Work

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:30:00 +0000

What Is an Operating System? introduced processes and threads in a few paragraphs, and What Is a Processor? showed the hardware they run on. This article gives them the space they deserve. Almost every question about how a program behaves when it does more than one thing at a time, from “why did my server run out of memory?” to “why does this counter come out wrong?”, comes down to the difference between a process and a thread.

What Is an Operating System? History, Architectures and How It Works

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every program you have ever written leaned on an operating system without asking. Printing a line, opening a file, allocating memory, waiting for a key press: none of these is something a processor knows how to do. The operating system does them on the program’s behalf, and does them for hundreds of other programs at the same time without letting any of them trample the others.

What Is Programming? followed the history of telling machines what to do. This article follows the program that stands between every other program and the machine: what it is, how it came to exist, the main ways it can be built, and, in some detail, how it actually works.