Writing an operating system is no easy feat, but it is extremely rewarding and helps polish the skills of even the most accomplished programmer. Operating systems are beautiful and complex, and understanding them is merely the first step to implementing them. In this class, we learned how to write an operating from scratch on the popular handheld computer Raspberry Pi. Previous courses at Stanford like CS107 and CS110 teach topics like processes, memory, and file systems, but this class delves deeper by teaching you how to implement these features from the ground up. In addition, this class does this using the Rust programming language. A major goal of this class is to understand the inner workings of an operating system: to not only know which gears it contains but to also understand how to turn those gears. Let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of the operating system we built in this class. Continue reading →