I like this way of doing things. Some people are brilliant and very good at general communication but just don't interview well due to various factors. This sort of free form conversation should put them at ease as well.
We don't see this happening for tech jobs, and at the worst, interviewers will still ask programming language specific questions. Plus "meaningful patch" might mean different things to different people.
I wish we had more of these, not least because of the first comment: "great post. Didn't know it was this easy ;)"
People assume a lot of low level stuff like this is near magic not for mere mortals, and it's a great shame, because there's a lot of this kind of low level stuff that more people would benefit from playing with.
And because demystifying it is a great path to get people into kernel hacking even if they don't end up writing their own complete kernel.
This stuff is not magic. But it requires a lot of reading and hunting for proper documentation on a platform as convoluted as x86. An ARM board would probably be way easier to play with. I never looked at the Pi. How well does it lend itself to this type of hacking?
Specific ARM boards might very well be easier, in that a lot of them are clean slate designs, so you're not dragging along nearly 40 years of PC history. But ARM CPU's themselves is plagued by the fact that OEMs can put pretty much whatever they want in there, so there is a proliferation of really weird beasts.
You could jump into a project like MikeOS, which has guides for modifying and extending [0], but the know-how from a bootloader should be enough to get you going.
I share the same feeling. I've done even a better boot loader which could load a simple shell on the floppy when I was 13. However, only in 16 bits and use bios INTs.
