Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment order> Reinventing the wheel is generally said to be something to be avoided, but there’s quite a bit to learn from actually doing it. It made me realize that I didn’t understand it as well as I could implement it from scratch. I wrote a bitmap image library in C a few months ago and when I realized that I was in too deep I just kept going because I can never abandon a project I start. I felt bad…
That reminds me of a three week, three person group project I had back when I was in university. There were a couple of topics we could pick from, including writing a very simple operating system from scratch. I asked the professors if we could instead port MINIX3 to the Raspberry Pi (given that it already had an ARM port to the BeagleBoard) and they accepted. What was supposed to be a reasonably straightforward project proved to be a huge…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 916
- Total comments
- 95
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-10-04 | Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compilerFirst breakout · Best thread | abc_tkys | 604 | 69 |
| 2022-11-19 | We ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6) on our home-built CPU and compiler(2020) | gengear | 3 | 0 |
| 2022-11-27 | We ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6) on our home-built CPU with our home-built C compiler | markus_zhang | 4 | 0 |
| 2025-06-28 | We ran a Unix-like OS on our home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler (2020)Latest 20+ point return | AlexeyBrin | 305 | 26 |