There's nothing trivial about it. Following a book while being taught at a University over a semester is vastly different from what the OP is talking about. For example, he is talking about writing his own PCIe, SATA and USB drivers as well as, well, everything. He is not talking about starting with MINIX and a well-digested book that guides you through the process.
In fact, your suggestion is exactly on point: The OP should pick-up Tannenbaum's book and take a year to implement everything in the book. Why a year? He is a web developer and, I presume, working. It will take more than time to learn what he does not know in order to even do the work. So, let's say a year.
I would suspect that after doing that his view of what he proposed might just be radically different.
For example, wait until he figures out that he has to write drivers for chip-to-chip interfaces such as SPI and I2C. Or that implementing a full USB stack will also require supporting the very legacy interfaces he wants to avoid. Or that writing low-level code to configure and boot devices such as DRAM memory controllers and graphics chips might just be a little tougher than he thought.
There's a reason why Linux has had tens of thousands of contributors and millions of lines of code:
I would urge you to really think that statement through. Are you proposing that writing all the drivers and low-level code that already exists is trivial? I don't think you are. What, then, is bringing up an OS on a desktop platform?
Writing some kind of a minimalist hobby OS on top of the huge body of work that is represented by the drivers and code that serve to wake up the machine is very different from having to start from scratch.
My original comment has nothing whatsoever to do with anything other than the originally linked blog post which describes almost literally starting from scratch, ignoring decades of wisdom and re-writing everything. That is simply not reasonable for someone who's experience is limited to doing web coding and dabbling with C for hobby projects. In that context, just writing the PCI driver code is an almost insurmountable task.
If I were advising this fellow I'd suggest that he study and try to implement the simplest of OS's on a small embedded development board. This cuts through all the crud. Then, if he survives that, I might suggest that he moves on to Tanenbaum's book and take the time to implement all of that. Again, in the context of a working web professional, that's easily a year or more of work.
After that --with far more knowledge at hand-- I might suggest that he start to now ask the right questions and create a list of modifications for the product that came out of the book.
Far, very, very far from the above is the idea of starting with a completely blank slate and rolling a new OS that takes advantage of nearly nothing from prior generations of OS's. And to do that all by himself.
In fact, your suggestion is exactly on point: The OP should pick-up Tannenbaum's book and take a year to implement everything in the book. Why a year? He is a web developer and, I presume, working. It will take more than time to learn what he does not know in order to even do the work. So, let's say a year.
I would suspect that after doing that his view of what he proposed might just be radically different.
For example, wait until he figures out that he has to write drivers for chip-to-chip interfaces such as SPI and I2C. Or that implementing a full USB stack will also require supporting the very legacy interfaces he wants to avoid. Or that writing low-level code to configure and boot devices such as DRAM memory controllers and graphics chips might just be a little tougher than he thought.
There's a reason why Linux has had tens of thousands of contributors and millions of lines of code:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development...
...and that's just the kernel.