OSDev.org

This might sound preposterous, but hear me out.

Currently, all the wiki content and various OS tutorials reach a certain level of OS advancement. Past that, it’s basically mandatory that you learn how to RTFM. This isn’t a problem in itself, though.

The current trend of the OS development community makes it seem like the field of OS development is rapidly expanding. However, that is simply quantity over quality.

Exhibit A: as of posting, the last post on the “OS Design and Theory” forum was a month ago. The latest post on the “OS Development” forum (where people usually ask for help) was today. Guess what the topic of the post was? It’s an easy guess. paging

Now obviously, I am not innocent in this regard at all. A couple years ago, I was no better than anyone else who asks for PAE help on this forum.

Why is this a problem? It seems that, day by day, the OS development scene is flooded with more novices than it can accommodate. Most of the senior OS developer types, the “I was there when FSF was born” types, will in the next ten years either retire, die, or cognitively decline.
These senior OS developers have been carrying the entire hobbyist scene on their backs with virtually no compensation or recognition.

The typical OS developer these days follows a typical routine. 1. Do the Bare Bones. 2. Install Limine. 3. Struggle with basic CPU and IO configuration. 4. If they make it past that hurdle, then they write a scheduler, copying UNIX kernel designs. 5. Maybe port a libc. 6. Maybe port gcc. 7. Sit back and do nothing.

This is why Terry Davis, for all his faults, deserves recognition as a savant OS developer. He wrote the HolyC compiler, then wrote TempleOS completely from scratch (no bootloader or libc), and not only did it all alone, but he made an extremely unique (if not limited) design that was actually reasonably sensible.

My main point is that all of the extremely experienced OS developers are fading away, replaced by a new generation of socially incompetent, narcissistic teenagers who do not actually fully understand the concepts of OS development and will likely not be competent enough to keep the OS development community alive and healthy.

I do not intend on arguing this from a position of superiority. I simply argue this from a perspective that I perceive to be full of clarity. I am definitely no senior OS developer, and none of my work measures up to what most moderators on these forums have accomplished. Yet, I worry that, in due enough time, the knowledge and wisdom that is required to become a OS developer with the same skill level as a London cab driver will simply disappear alongside the prolifically technical minds who harbor them.

Thoughts?

What you said is not preposterous at all and I've been thinking about the exact same thing since the end of the 90s, when I started realizing that architectures are becoming more complex and documentation on the hardware more closed at each cycle. The level of complexity of a computer nowadays, even a small one like a mobile phone, is staggering. Things have evolved, not always for the best. Besides, a lot of the complexity nowadays stems for a (sometimes pathological) need for backwards compatibility. ARM didn't make things easier, as the architecture has adopted (and adapted) many of decisions (good and bad) of other architectures. Which, in part, makes sense, but it also has drawbacks. The x86-64, which appeared around 2002, if I remember correctly, also didn't make things easier, just added more complexity on top of an already complex device and it's all been downhill from there.

A possible lack of documentation, if reality, would put all OS development expertise in the hands of a select corporate few, ultimately autocratizing all computing for good. That really scares me.

Which is exactly what we've been seeing for a long time. The time to be scared with that future is over. Now is the time to panic because it became reality. Fortunately, there still some ingenious people out there able to somehow reverse engineer a lot. I can't be sure, I don't have statistics and not even anecdotal evidence, but I have a deep chilling feeling that most of what is considered public knowledge nowadays was acquired this way.