Anyone know what the driver story is with SerenityOS? Is it a standard Unix/Linux thing, where drivers have to be compiled against an unstable ABI/API? Or is it more like Windows where drivers are forward/backward compatible?
This is the opposite of Haiku-OS, for example, which tries to provide at least the minimal amount of drivers, and some people are using it on real hardware.
It was actually a really interesting decision, to concentrate all efforts on the fun parts of OS development, and completely ignore the 80% which is boring, frustrating, and requires a large continuous investment to stay up to date with the latest stuff. Looking at Haiku, they have been working on their OS for decades now, and still aren't in a generally usable form.
I'm not sure what a QEMU-only OS is actually good for, other than playing around with it, but maybe I'm not the target audience :)
In case the the graphics drivers are not supported, VESA and/or Framebuffer drivers come to aid, and provide a usable system.
And obviously, nothing prevents people from writing drivers eventually. Andreas probably wants to run Serenity on whatever his hardware is eventually. But there's little point in doing that till we actually have a mature system that anyone would want to run daily.
I’m waiting for someone to start working on a custom cpu for it at this point :)