As Screwtape mentions,

“osdev” makes me expect articles on things like “how to map the VGA framebuffer” and “how to get from 8086 real mode to x86_64 long mode”.

I think this kind of content, even though maybe it’s not quite of-a-kind with plan9 stuff, should be encouraged.

Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between non-mainstream OSes, experimental OS ideas, and OSes that have not yet reached a stable or usable level of development. I expect any ‘osdev’ tag to be used the way the ‘plt’ tag is – in other words, a mix of theory, practice, and spotlights on interesting experiments/research that doesn’t quite fit in other tags.

Certain articles that are currently tagged ‘historical’ but are concerned with the low-level interface to firmware, like the os2 blog entries about the A20 gate & unreal mode, could find a better home in an osdev tag. This seems like a ‘win’ for me.

(I should note that, as the author of two OS projects incorporating strange philosophical & technical ideas, an osdev tag benefits me quite a bit – I don’t have the time or energy to do OS work anymore but a new tag gives me an excuse to post about these old projects and talk about them!)

The advantage of osdev, in my opinion, is that it’s less likely to be erroneously attributed to mainstream operating systems.

I’d like to see in this group contents that challenge mainstream design of operating systems, so that using it for, say, a posix tool would be clearly off topic.

I see a lot of Plan 9 links in the list, and I don’t think anybody running Plan 9 these days is doing operating systems research or writing papers about it, so “osres” or “os-research” doesn’t seem to fit. Meanwhile, “osdev” makes me expect articles on things like “how to map the VGA framebuffer” and “how to get from 8086 real mode to x86_64 long mode”.

“os” is perhaps a little generic, but I guess the alternative would be to tag such posts as “software”, which is even more so.

Good links to prior threads justifying it. There was 43 in favor of “os” with 35 on “osdev” in last call. Those should probably be our default options. I’m still in favor of OS since “Operating Systems” is a category covering descriptions and development that’s already standardized in tagging systems, universities, commercial suppliers, and FOSS. We could do a vote on it by having two comments, one os and one osdev, with people voting on which one they want.