OS Experiment in Rust (part 1)

<p>Long ago, in the mid-late 1990’s, I got interested in the low-level operations of my PC and was determined to write a somewhat simple hobby OS in order to teach myself how the system worked under the hood. At the time, I wrote it all in assembly on my 486, and the goal was to make something that would bootstrap to <a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Protected_Mode">32-bit protected mode</a> and also interact with the core hardware components on the system: <a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Vesa">VESA</a>, <a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/IDE">IDE</a>, <a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/%228042%22_PS/2_Controller">8042 keyboard controller</a>, the <a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller">Floppy Disk Controller</a>, etc. Recently, I became interested again in exploring this space, but “PC” hardware has come a long way - both in terms of <em>features</em> as well as <em>standards</em>. So (if I stick to it), I’ll put together a series of intermittently-written blog articles that document my experience revisiting this hobby on modern systems, targeting a minimum set of system hardware requirements that are commonplace on pretty much every PC designed in the past 5 years.</p>