While I have been an user of this forum for nearly a decade, I never actually learned ASM. I simply do not have the patience and willpower for such a long term goal. I do, however, enjoy seeing other people ASM archievements.
At this moment, I'm mostly interesed in Hypervisors (Xen) and virtualization, which is where I spend my research time. My goal: To put everything on top of a virtualization layer in a way that it can become pretty much OS-independent, yet getting a fully functional Windows VM out of it. This is currently possible via PCI and VGA Passthrough, however, it is a bit hard to set up, and constant changes to both Xen, the Linux Kernel, and other packages, fix and break things constantly.


There is another thing I'm interesed too: UEFI. The infrastructure that can be build around UEFI seems to have enormous potential, so far development for it is minimal. In the past there has been a lot of people doing hobby OSes, the most I featured I recall were MenuetOS, KolibriOS and DexOS. However, if I recall correctly, they are all from pre-UEFI era and I suppose that they should be using legacy boot. I'm curious if anyone tried to actually make a more modern, UEFI-based OS, that instead of needing a MBR Boot Loader, FAT Drivers and all that legacy stuff, relies on what UEFI provides to get a workable OS then build on top of that.

Another thing I looked around are EFI Drivers. I don't have clear if they only work during the pre-boot UEFI phase or can stay resident to be used by the OS that is going to be loaded next. Assuming that they can stay resident, you could have Hardware based around an EFI Driver, then provide a minimal relay Driver for the OS so you can have a fully functional Hardware piece from pre-boot with OS-independent Drivers (Like paravirtualization) instead of having to develop Linux and Windows versions separately, so device support and features could be centralized. With the current trend of some manufacturers to be more open with their Hardware specifications for Open Source Drivers development, I think that it could be an interesing option.

So, any other ideas, projects, or actual working applications that are thinking to make UEFI a whole OS platform instead of just a pre-boot enviroment?

This of UEFI like 64bit DOS. It doesn't have proper multithreading, it lacks good timers and, unlike DOS, have too much abstractions inside. So, only one thing will make your life easier - you won't need to jump from 16bit. You can't use UEFI FAT driver - it has very poor implementation. NTFS driver is read-only, other filesystems support is not more than nothing. And USB drivers are good only for keyboard, mouse and USB mass-storage. And possibly wont work properly with other devices. But, to support RuntimeServices you need to change your kernel and/or your bootloader. You can start to play with BareMetalOS for example, without PureX64, as you won't need to jump from 16bit. But you'll need to implement other stuff as usual (and even more, to support RuntimeServices like Get/SetVariable from NVS).