Esteve Personal Blog

Today I’ve started my University project on Telecommunication, it is more of the Computer Science field, but I’ll handle it under Telecommunication, there is no problem. I’ll be posting most of articles and code I produce in a reduced/sketch form, or at least I’ll try to do so. The whole project will be written in English, which is not my mother language, so if anyone finds it hard to understand, please give me some advice on how to make it clearer

To start with I’ve made a small outline of the parts of the project, and here it is:

Introduction: I’ll try to explain the scope of the projects, it’s goals, motivation and so on.

General Design : This will be divided into two logical sections, in the first one I’ll give some ideas about what is a kernel, classifications and available commercial kernels. The second part will talk about the target architecture (X86), why I’ve chosen it and future portability issues.

Working Environment #1 : Before every chapter, if necessary I’ll explain how to set up the computer to be able to follow the practical part of the project covered in the following chapter. All the programs I’ll be using will be open source and widely used, so I won’t have to cover them in depth, as much more accurate information is available on the net. This first environment will cover Nasm compiler, Bochs Emulator and Grub.

Source Tree : I’ll be also commenting where the sources can be found and how I structures the.

Boot Process : From POST until grub or our boot loader is run. This is the point to explain real, unreal, protected, VM86 modes. After we have the base to start building our own boot loader. When we are done with the boot loader, I have a look inside the Multiboot standard and will implement a small kernel (ASM) which works with Grub and being multiboot.

Working Environment #2: Now some more tools need to be installed, Gcc and it’s options, Ld and how to build a Cross Compiler, I have already tried it with Linux and MacOsX, now I need to do some research under Windows ( does anyone have a PC ? ).

First Kernel : Will implement two small kernels, which boot and print something on screen. A flat binary, which will boot with our bootloader and a an ELF binary which will boot with Grub. In this part I’ll cover ELF standard here, and finally I argue why not to continue with our bootloader and switch to Grub.

Memory: Segmentation, pagination, … This section also uses our bootloader to help clarify some concepts. This page also cover the initial memory design which will be two level pages. The first memory map will be drawn. And finally it will be implemented in the ELF Grub Kernel.

Interrupts and exceptions: Explain what are they, how they work and how we implement the basics on TizOs.

Driver Layout: The TizOs Driver Api is explained and implemented with some details on the basic peripherals and maybe some PCI ( if I have enough time).

MultiTask : Yet to determine of much I will explain, but I already have implemented some simple multitasking OS.

This first outline is just a little reference and If possible I won’t stop at multitasking, and will try to add more things.

This same document, a little more explained is available in Catalan.

Yesterday was my birthday, and today, as a present, my mother has given me a Japanese Teapot, now I only need to learn how to brew a nice green tea. I’ll post how to do it as soon as I feel confident with the technique, hope in less than a lifetime. The photo was done while heating some water, because of the bad light the steam can not be seen.

From Oriol News Portal I found this service which draws a map out of the countries you have visited. I had already heard about this service through Pof and Minid but had never tried it before, finally, here is my map:

Download your language keymap from
Opendarwin Keymap , copy it to /Library/Keyboard Layouts/, and change XDarwin config.

Last year ( 2004) as x-mas present I got a Wok, I was really looking forward to having one, so I was very excited when I got it, I had not tried it before, since I was not in Barcelona and did not have to cook for myself, but finally yesterday I tried it, cooking with a wok is really fun but required cutting the vegetables in really small pieces, I did that with the regular knives I had at home and found it really tedious and sometimes even dangerous…

So this morning I went to buy a Japanese Usuba (thin blade) knife, I finally bought a 225mm Bunmei Usuba (reference 1802/225). After buying it I felt a little bad, I thought it was too much money for a knife, when I came home, having gone to buy some vegetable before, and made my lunch with it I was really surprised, I had never tried such a good knive! Cutting into precice pieces was no hasle at all, I don’t know how I lived without one of those knives.

Knife Care
After using it I thought that for sure some care had to be taken to clean and store it, after googling a little bit I found on all pages that the cleaning had to be done with just hot water on both sides and then using a cloth to dry it.

Some more advices can be found here