Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

Hmm. No one has mentioned Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Nissan and Schocken (which is absolutely superb).

I would be interested.

There are a lot of books on this topic. You could always build a better mousetrap, of course.

I'd be interested in a better mousetrap, OR find a new niche rather than yet another minix. How about a RTOS soft or hard your choice, or write it in a new or obscure language, or target it to a microcontroller (PIC32 ?) or target it to a softcore in a FPGA and develop the peripherals as you develop the drivers for them in parallel. How about an OS designed from the start specifically to live inside virtual containers, to optimize its performance both boot up, drivers, and shutdown while virtualized?

Has anyone ever written a power-aware OS and what would that mean? I don't mean a mere ACPI driver but something written from the bottom up to minimize watt/hrs burned by the OS rather than pure speed as sole criteria. That would be an interesting "hook" even if the rest of the book is fairly traditional.

How about an OS that is some kind of kissing cousin / lovechild of a java virtual machine? Where the native executable format is a jar file, where the whole thing runs in the JVM, for no reason other than I'm daydreaming right now?

(Edited to add, I like retrocomputing so how about a C re-implementation of a classic OS, like maybe PDP-8 OS/8? Small simple yet capable, make it as compatible as you can. Or TRSDOS, or port Microware OS-9 and/or Nitros9 to ... something, maybe intel PC I donno)

(Edited to add, strange filesystem idea #2515 how about a cloud / nosql database as your native root filesystem? What a strange idea, yet interesting.)

I'd be interested, but how about doing one for x64 assembly? There are already two teaching kernels available for x86 (from MIT and Stanford).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintos

I think Minix is also x86, so that may be 3.

Probably not. I say this not to discourage you from writing, but to prompt you to write a book that does something -- a book worthy of fundamental disagreement and passionate debate.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [1] covers the really interesting parts of the book you are considering, and skips the parts that can't really be given decent treatment: x86 Assembly, C, and writing a toy operating system. Likewise, Linux from Scratch covers understanding the practical side of Operating Systems [2].

A book I want to read has "EMACS really is an operating system" as it's thesis and then proceeds to show why and how our concept of operating system covers it -- a book that challenges our comfort in distinguishing operating systems.

Another book I want is "Build an Operating System for $3.47 worth of Breadboarded Chips." There's a book which pushes the lower bounds of computing. Something that provides fertile ground for new ideas.

Write a book at the edges, in the space between computer science curricula and actual practice. Write it just for people who are interested in operating systems. Write it for skimmers and strugglers and dilettantes and professionals. Write it so that people will learn, but also so that some will disagree on conceptual [rather than technical] grounds.

Then it might find a niche.

Good luck.

[1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

[2] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/