Being the first blog post I've made on OS, even better, the first blog post I've made in general, this will be a fun read. I apologize in advance- I promise to restore any loss of cognition that occurs as a result of this read.
Having taken a lovely, albeit sometimes confusing course on OS theory from my university, I decided to do it myself. "xv6 doesn't seem too hard to write, I could do that," I thought. So far, I've eaten crow, but have learned a metric crap ton about limine, and drawing text in VGA graphics mode. If you want, you could probably skip the rest of this post by checking out those last two links, but I'll be going on anyway. I'll miss you!
Firstly, limine, a project by mintsuki, is a great, quick and easy way to get into long mode. Simply add a few requests to your kernel's C source, ensure gcc is appeased, linking and compiling happens, and you're basically ready to go. No assembly code required. One issue, though, is that there's not a lot of easy ways to acquire "bitmaps" of fonts once you're in such a deep mode. Protected mode has ways to program VGA registers, and real mode has ways to copy the BIOS stored bitmap from BIOS calls.
There's a few ways around this: hardcoding bitmaps into kernel code, or reading from some file in a filesystem. Currently, I get around this using flanterm, another cool project by mintsuki. For now, this basically favors the hardcoding bitmap approach, so it should honestly be trashed ASAP in favor of something else.
And that's basically it. Today president Trump got shot, ironically, so I'm giving it a rest for now before the world blows up. I'll see you all on the other side.