Yeah, the bootloader is responsible for the hardware stuff up to this point. It doesn't take that much more assembly code to bootstrap C in the Linux kernel on

Yeah, the bootloader is responsible for the hardware stuff up to this point. It doesn't take that much more assembly code to bootstrap C in the Linux kernel on x86: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/boot/header.S https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/boot/... There are a bunch of other headers in that file, but the "start_of_setup:" label is what's invoked by the bootloader, and "calll main" transitions to C. So 32 lines of code, by my count.