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I am fascinated with bootloaders and kernel writing. I am not very good at it, but I am fascinated by it, and every so often I try to learn some more. It feels
by HappyMans 5y ago
I am fascinated with bootloaders and kernel writing. I am not very good at it, but I am fascinated by it, and every so often I try to learn some more. It feels a bit like a useless skill to learn (legacy BIOS bootloaders, that is) given UEFI dominance. But it connects me with my childhood playing with 286es and wondering how to program them.
I love articles like this that break it down. The biggest challenges so far have been getting the assembler to output the correct format (ie, 16 bit real mode) and learning inline assembler in C (and getting GCC to output the correct format).
- kingcharles 5y agoThis is the book I learned from in the 90s: https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd-Rom/dp/0672306557 https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd... It's basically "Writing an Operating System from Scratch for Dummies". I actually wrote my own graphical x86 OS starting from the code in there.
- HappyMans 5y agoThank you so much for the recommendation. Been looking for something like this for a while. Do you think it's a waste of my time to be learning this in 2021?
- kingcharles 5y agoI definitely don't think it is a waste of time. I found it really fascinating to find out how a PC boots up from zero and how a very basic kernel is coded.