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Kernel Designs
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Modular Kernel Higher Half Kernel 64-bit Kernel

In this tutorial we will write a simple kernel for 32-bit x86 and boot it. This is the first step in creating your own operating system.

This tutorial attempts to serves as an example of how to create a minimal extensible system, following best practice. This article is heavily based on Bare Bones, but unlike it, this article attempts to serve as an example of how to structure your code and project, rather than throwing it all away in the next step with Meaty Skeleton.

This tutorial uses existing technology to get you started and straight into kernel development, rather than developing your own programming language, your own compiler, and your own bootloader. In this tutorial, we use:

• The GNU Linker from Binutils to link our object files into the final kernel.
• The NASM Assembler to assemble instructions into object files containing machine code.
• The GNU Compiler Collection to compile our high level code into assembly.
• The C programming language (or optionally C++) to write the high level parts of our kernel.
• The GRUB bootloader to load our kernel using the Multiboot boot protocol that loads us into 32-bit protected mode with paging disabled.
• The ELF as the executable format that gives us control of where and how the kernel is loaded.

This article assumes you are using a Unix-like operating system such as Linux which supports operating systems development well. Windows users should be able to complete it from a MinGW, Cygwin, or if Windows 10, the Windows Subsystem For Linux environment.(Note: if using WSL, you will want Ubuntu 18.04 from the store, rather than Ubuntu, which defaults to 16.04 and has GCC 5 instead of GCC 7/8)

Succeeding at operating systems development requires becoming an expert, having patience, and reading all the instructions very carefully. You need to read everything in this article before proceeding. If you run into problems, you need to reread the article even more carefully and then do it thrice more for good measure. If you still have issues, our community is experienced and will gladly help at the forums or on IRC.

WAIT! Have you read Getting Started, Beginner Mistakes, and some of the related OS theory?

Building a Cross-Compiler

Main article: GCC Cross-Compiler

The first thing you should do is set up a GCC Cross-Compiler for i686-elf. You have not yet modified your compiler to know about the existence of your operating system, so we use a generic target called i686-elf, which provides you with a toolchain targeting the System V ABI. This setting is well tested and understood by the osdev community and will allow you to easily set up a bootable kernel using GRUB and Multiboot. (Note that if you are already using an ELF platform, such as Linux, you may already have a GCC that produces ELF programs. This is not suitable for osdev work, as this compiler will produce programs for Linux, and your operating system is not Linux, no matter how similar it is. You will certainly run into trouble if you don't use a cross-compiler.)

You will not be able to correctly compile your operating system without a cross-compiler.

You will not be able to correctly complete this tutorial with a x86_64-elf cross-compiler, as GRUB is only able to load 32-bit multiboot kernels. If this is your first operating system project, you should do a 32-bit kernel first. If you use a x86_64 compiler instead and somehow bypass the later sanity check, you will end up with a kernel that GRUB doesn't know how to boot.

Overview

By now, you should have set up your cross-compiler for i686-elf (as described above). This tutorial provides a minimal solution for creating an operating system for x86, and attempts to serve as a starting point to expand your kernel.

To start with, we just need three main files:

• boot.asm - kernel entry point that sets up the processor environment
• kernel.c - your actual kernel routines
• linker.ld - tells LD how to link the above files together

Project Structure

The way you layout your project can be very important. Consider that you may eventually wish to port your operating system to systems other than x86, or just to organize your code.

Directory Structure:

• Project
  • src
    • kernel
      • arch
        • i686
          • boot.asm
          • linker.ld
    • kernel.c

Build System

A build system is outside the scope of this tutorial, so it is assumed you have one set up and are able to make it work.

Booting the Operating System

To start the operating system, an existing piece of software will be needed to load it. This is called the bootloader and in this tutorial we will be using GRUB. Writing your own bootloader is an advanced subject, but it is commonly done. We'll later configure the bootloader, but the operating system needs to handle when the bootloader passes control to it. The kernel is passed a very minimal environment, in which the stack is not set up yet, virtual memory is not yet enabled, hardware is not initialized, and so on.

The first task we will deal with is how the bootloader starts the kernel. We are lucky because there exists a Multiboot Standard, which describes an easy interface between the bootloader and the operating system kernel. It works by putting a few magic values in some global variables (known as a multiboot header), which is searched for by the bootloader. When it sees these values, it recognizes the kernel as multiboot compatible and it knows how to load us, and it can even forward us important information such as memory maps, but we won't need that yet.

Since there is no stack yet and we need to make sure the global variables are set correctly, we will do this in assembly.

Bootstrap Assembly

We will now create a file called boot.asm and discuss its contents. In this example, we are using the NASM assembler.

The very most important piece to create is the multiboot header, as it must be very early in the kernel binary, or the bootloader will fail to recognize us. Our linker script linker.ld will ensure it is near the beginning.

Kernel/arch/i686/boot.asm

; Declare constants for the multiboot header.
MBALIGN  equ  1 << 0            ; align loaded modules on page boundaries
MEMINFO  equ  1 << 1            ; provide memory map
FLAGS    equ  MBALIGN | MEMINFO ; this is the Multiboot 'flag' field
MAGIC    equ  0x1BADB002        ; 'magic number' lets bootloader find the header
CHECKSUM equ -(MAGIC + FLAGS)   ; checksum of above, to prove we are multiboot
 
; Declare a multiboot header that marks the program as a kernel. These are magic
; values that are documented in the multiboot standard. The bootloader will
; search for this signature in the first 8 KiB of the kernel file, aligned at a
; 32-bit boundary. The signature is in its own section so the header can be
; forced to be within the first 8 KiB of the kernel file.
section .multiboot
align 4
	dd MAGIC
	dd FLAGS
	dd CHECKSUM
 
; The multiboot standard does not define the value of the stack pointer register
; (esp) and it is up to the kernel to provide a stack. This allocates room for a
; small stack by creating a symbol at the bottom of it, then allocating 16384
; bytes for it, and finally creating a symbol at the top. The stack grows
; downwards on x86. The stack on x86 must be 16-byte aligned according to the
; System V ABI standard and de-facto extensions. The compiler will assume the
; stack is properly aligned and failure to align the stack will result in
; undefined behavior.
section .bss
align 16
stack_bottom:
resb 16384 ; 16 KiB
stack_top:
 
; The linker script specifies _start as the entry point to the kernel and the
; bootloader will jump to this position once the kernel has been loaded. It
; doesn't make sense to return from this function as the bootloader is gone.
; Declare _start as a function symbol with the given symbol size.
section .text
global _start:function (_start.end - _start)
_start:
	; The bootloader has loaded us into 32-bit protected mode on a x86
	; machine. Interrupts are disabled. Paging is disabled. The processor
	; state is as defined in the multiboot standard. The kernel has full
	; control of the CPU. The kernel can only make use of hardware features
	; and any code it provides as part of itself. There's no printf
	; function, unless the kernel provides its own <stdio.h> header and a
	; printf implementation. There are no security restrictions, no
	; safeguards, no debugging mechanisms, only what the kernel provides
	; itself. It has absolute and complete power over the
	; machine.
 
	; To set up a stack, we set the esp register to point to the top of our
	; stack (as it grows downwards on x86 systems). This is necessarily done
	; in assembly as languages such as C cannot function without a stack.
	mov esp, stack_top
 
	; This is a good place to initialize crucial processor state before the
	; high-level kernel is entered. It's best to minimize the early
	; environment where crucial features are offline. Note that the
	; processor is not fully initialized yet: Features such as floating
	; point instructions and instruction set extensions are not initialized
	; yet. The GDT should be loaded here. Paging should be enabled here.
	; C++ features such as global constructors and exceptions will require
	; runtime support to work as well.
 
	; Enter the high-level kernel. The ABI requires the stack is 16-byte
	; aligned at the time of the call instruction (which afterwards pushes
	; the return pointer of size 4 bytes). The stack was originally 16-byte
	; aligned above and we've since pushed a multiple of 16 bytes to the
	; stack since (pushed 0 bytes so far) and the alignment is thus
	; preserved and the call is well defined.
        ; note, that if you are building on Windows, C functions may have "_" prefix in assembly: _kmain
	extern kmain
	call kmain
 
	; If the system has nothing more to do, put the computer into an
	; infinite loop. To do that:
	; 1) Disable interrupts with cli (clear interrupt enable in eflags).
	;    They are already disabled by the bootloader, so this is not needed.
	;    Mind that you might later enable interrupts and return from
	;    kmain (which is sort of nonsensical to do).
	; 2) Wait for the next interrupt to arrive with hlt (halt instruction).
	;    Since they are disabled, this will lock up the computer.
	; 3) Jump to the hlt instruction if it ever wakes up due to a
	;    non-maskable interrupt occurring or due to system management mode.
	cli
.hang:	hlt
	jmp .hang
.end:

You can then assemble boot.asm using:

nasm -felf32 boot.asm -o boot.o

Implementing the Kernel

So far we have written the bootstrap assembly stub that sets up the processor such that high level languages such as C can be used. It is also possible to use other languages such as C++.

Freestanding and Hosted Environments

If you have done C or C++ programming in user-space, you have used a so-called Hosted Environment. Hosted means that there is a C standard library and other useful runtime features. Alternatively, there is the Freestanding version, which is what we are using here. Freestanding means that there is no C standard library, only what we provide ourselves. However, some header files are actually not part of the C standard library, but rather the compiler. These remain available even in freestanding C source code. In this case we use <stdbool.h> to get the bool datatype, <stddef.h> to get size_t and NULL, and <stdint.h> to get the intx_t and uintx_t datatypes which are invaluable for operating systems development, where you need to make sure that the variable is of an exact size (if we used a short instead of uint16_t and the size of short changed, our VGA driver here would break!). Additionally you can access the <float.h>, <iso646.h>, <limits.h>, and <stdarg.h> headers, as they are also freestanding. GCC actually ships a few more headers, but these are special purpose.

Writing a kernel in C

The following shows how to create a simple kernel in C. This kernel uses the VGA text mode buffer (located at 0xB8000) as the output device. It sets up a simple driver that remembers the location of the next character in this buffer and provides a primitive for adding a new character. Notably, there is no support for line breaks ('\n') (and writing that character will show some VGA-specific character instead) and no support for scrolling when the screen is filled up. Adding this will be your first task. Please take a few moments to understand the code.

Kernel/kernel.c

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdint.h>

/* Check if the compiler thinks we are targeting the wrong operating system. */
#if defined(__linux__)
#error "You are not using a cross-compiler, you will most certainly run into trouble"
#endif

/* This tutorial will only work for the 32-bit ix86 targets. */
#if !defined(__i386__)
#error "This tutorial needs to be compiled with a ix86-elf compiler"
#endif

/* Hardware text mode color constants. */
enum vga_color {
	VGA_COLOR_BLACK = 0,
	VGA_COLOR_BLUE = 1,
	VGA_COLOR_GREEN = 2,
	VGA_COLOR_CYAN = 3,
	VGA_COLOR_RED = 4,
	VGA_COLOR_MAGENTA = 5,
	VGA_COLOR_BROWN = 6,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_GREY = 7,
	VGA_COLOR_DARK_GREY = 8,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_BLUE = 9,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_GREEN = 10,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_CYAN = 11,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_RED = 12,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_MAGENTA = 13,
	VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_BROWN = 14,
	VGA_COLOR_WHITE = 15,
};

static inline uint8_t vga_entry_color(enum vga_color fg, enum vga_color bg) 
{
	return fg | bg << 4;
}

static inline uint16_t vga_entry(unsigned char uc, uint8_t color) 
{
	return (uint16_t) uc | (uint16_t) color << 8;
}

size_t strlen(const char* str) 
{
	size_t len = 0;
	while (str[len])
		len++;
	return len;
}

static const size_t VGA_WIDTH = 80;
static const size_t VGA_HEIGHT = 25;

size_t terminal_row;
size_t terminal_column;
uint8_t terminal_color;
uint16_t* terminal_buffer;

void terminal_initialize(void) 
{
	terminal_row = 0;
	terminal_column = 0;
	terminal_color = vga_entry_color(VGA_COLOR_LIGHT_GREY, VGA_COLOR_BLACK);
	terminal_buffer = (uint16_t*) 0xB8000;
	for (size_t y = 0; y < VGA_HEIGHT; y++) {
		for (size_t x = 0; x < VGA_WIDTH; x++) {
			const size_t index = y * VGA_WIDTH + x;
			terminal_buffer[index] = vga_entry(' ', terminal_color);
		}
	}
}

void terminal_setcolor(uint8_t color) 
{
	terminal_color = color;
}

void terminal_putentryat(char c, uint8_t color, size_t x, size_t y) 
{
	const size_t index = y * VGA_WIDTH + x;
	terminal_buffer[index] = vga_entry(c, color);
}

void terminal_putchar(char c) 
{
	terminal_putentryat(c, terminal_color, terminal_column, terminal_row);
	if (++terminal_column == VGA_WIDTH) {
		terminal_column = 0;
		if (++terminal_row == VGA_HEIGHT)
			terminal_row = 0;
	}
}

void terminal_write(const char* data, size_t size) 
{
	for (size_t i = 0; i < size; i++)
		terminal_putchar(data[i]);
}

void terminal_writestring(const char* data) 
{
	terminal_write(data, strlen(data));
}

void kmain(void) 
{
	/* Initialize terminal interface */
	terminal_initialize();

	/* Newline support is left as an exercise. */
	terminal_writestring("Hello, kernel World!\n");
}

Notice how we wish to use the common C function strlen, but this function is part of the C standard library that we don't have available. Instead, we rely on the freestanding header <stddef.h> to provide size_t and we simply declare our own implementation of strlen. You will have to do this for every function you wish to use (as the freestanding headers only provide macros and data types).

Note that this is a temporary measure to simplify this tutorial, later on you will want to want to create a libc with strlen and any other standard functions you need next to the kernel directory. Your build system should build the libc directory first, and the kernel should depend on it. See Meaty Skeleton for details on how to do this correctly.

Compile using:

i686-elf-gcc -c kernel.c -o kernel.o -std=gnu99 -ffreestanding -O2 -Wall -Wextra

Note that the above code uses a few extensions and hence we build as the GNU version of C99.

Writing a kernel in C++

Writing a kernel in C++ is easy. Note that not all features from the language is available. For instance, exception support requires special runtime support and so does memory allocation. To write a kernel in C++, simply adopt the code above: Add an extern "C" declaration to the main method. Notice how the kmain function has to be declared with C linkage, as otherwise the compiler would include type information in the assembly name (name mangling). This complicates calling the function from our above assembly stub and we therefore use C linkage, where the symbol name is the same as the name of the function (with no additional type information). Save the code as kernel.c++ (or what your favorite C++ filename extension is).

You can compile the file kernel.c++ using:

i686-elf-g++ -c kernel.c++ -o kernel.o -ffreestanding -O2 -Wall -Wextra -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti

Note that you must have also built a cross C++ compiler for this work.

Linking the Kernel

We can now assemble boot.s and compile kernel.c. This produces two object files that each contain part of the kernel. To create the full and final kernel we will have to link these object files into the final kernel program, usable by the bootloader. When developing user-space programs, your toolchain ships with default scripts for linking such programs. However, these are unsuitable for kernel development and we need to provide our own customized linker script. Save the following in linker.ld:

Kernel/arch/i686/linker.ld

/* The bootloader will look at this image and start execution at the symbol
   designated as the entry point. */
ENTRY(_start)

/* Tell where the various sections of the object files will be put in the final
   kernel image. */
SECTIONS
{
	/* Begin putting sections at 1 MiB, a conventional place for kernels to be
	   loaded at by the bootloader. */
	. = 1M;

	/* First put the multiboot header, as it is required to be put very early
	   early in the image or the bootloader won't recognize the file format.
	   Next we'll put the .text section. */
	.text BLOCK(4K) : ALIGN(4K)
	{
		*(.multiboot)
		*(.text)
	}

	/* Read-only data. */
	.rodata BLOCK(4K) : ALIGN(4K)
	{
		*(.rodata)
	}

	/* Read-write data (initialized) */
	.data BLOCK(4K) : ALIGN(4K)
	{
		*(.data)
	}

	/* Read-write data (uninitialized) and stack */
	.bss BLOCK(4K) : ALIGN(4K)
	{
		*(COMMON)
		*(.bss)
	}

	/* The compiler may produce other sections, by default it will put them in
	   a segment with the same name. Simply add stuff here as needed. */
}

With these components you can now actually build the final kernel. We use the compiler as the linker as it allows it greater control over the link process. Note that if your kernel is written in C++, you should use the C++ compiler instead.

You can then link your kernel using:

i686-elf-gcc -T linker.ld -o myos.bin -ffreestanding -O2 -nostdlib boot.o kernel.o -lgcc

Note: Some tutorials suggest linking with i686-elf-ld rather than the compiler, however this prevents the compiler from performing various tasks during linking.

The file myos.bin is now your kernel (all other files are no longer needed). Note that we are linking against libgcc, which implements various runtime routines that your cross-compiler depends on. Leaving it out will give you problems in the future. If you did not build and install libgcc as part of your cross-compiler, you should go back now and build a cross-compiler with libgcc. The compiler depends on this library and will use it regardless of whether you provide it or not.

Verifying Multiboot

If you have GRUB installed, you can check whether a file has a valid Multiboot version 1 header, which is the case for our kernel. It's important that the Multiboot header is within the first 8 KiB of the actual program file at 4 byte alignment. This can potentially break later if you make a mistake in the boot assembly, the linker script, or anything else that might go wrong. If the header isn't valid, GRUB will give an error that it can't find a Multiboot header when you try to boot it. This code fragment will help you diagnose such cases:

grub-file --is-x86-multiboot myos.bin

grub-file is quiet but will exit 0 (successfully) if it is a valid multiboot kernel and exit 1 (unsuccessfully) otherwise. You can type echo $? in your shell immediately afterwards to see the exit status. You can add this grub-file check to your build scripts as a sanity test to catch the problem at compile time. Multiboot version 2 can be checked with the --is-x86-multiboot2 option instead. If you invoke the grub-file command manually in a shell, it is convenient to wrap it in a conditional to easily see the status. This command should work now:

if grub-file --is-x86-multiboot myos.bin; then
  echo multiboot confirmed
else
  echo the file is not multiboot
fi

Booting the Kernel

In a few moments, you will see your kernel in action.

Building a bootable cdrom image

You can easily create a bootable CD-ROM image containing the GRUB bootloader and your kernel using the program grub-mkrescue. You may need to install the GRUB utility programs and the program xorriso (version 0.5.6 or higher). First you should create a file called grub.cfg containing the contents:

menuentry "myos" {
	multiboot /boot/myos.bin
}

Note that the braces must be placed as shown here. You can now create a bootable image of your operating system by typing these commands:

mkdir -p isodir/boot/grub
cp myos.bin isodir/boot/myos.bin
cp grub.cfg isodir/boot/grub/grub.cfg
grub-mkrescue -o myos.iso isodir

Congratulations! You have now created a file called myos.iso that contains your Hello World operating system. If you don't have the program grub-mkrescue installed, now is a good time to install GRUB. It should already be installed on Linux systems. Windows users will likely want to use a Cygwin variant if no native grub-mkrescue program is available.

Warning: GNU GRUB, the bootloader used by grub-mkrescue, is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Your iso file contains copyrighted material under that license and redistributing it in violation of the GPL constitutes copyright infringement. The GPL requires you publish the source code corresponding to the bootloader. You need to get the exact source package corresponding to the GRUB package you have installed from your distribution, at the time grub-mkrescue is invoked (as distro packages are occasionally updated). You then need to publish that source code along with your ISO to satisfy the GPL. Alternative, you can build GRUB from source code yourself. Clone the latest GRUB git from savannah (do not use their last release from 2012, it's severely out of date). Run autogen.sh, ./configure and make dist. That makes a GRUB tarball. Extract it somewhere, then build GRUB from it, and install it in a isolated prefix. Add that to your PATH and ensure its grub-mkrescue program is used to produce your iso. Then publish the GRUB tarball of your own making along with your OS release. You're not required to publish the source code of your OS at all, only the code for the bootloader that's inside the iso.

Testing your operating system (QEMU)

Virtual Machines are very useful for development operating systems, as they allow you to quickly test your code and have access to the source code during the execution. Otherwise, you would be in for an endless cycle of reboots that would only annoy you. They start very quickly, especially combined with small operating systems such as ours.

In this tutorial, we will be using QEMU. You can also use other virtual machines if you please. Simply adding the ISO to the CD drive of an empty virtual machine will do the trick.

Install QEMU from your repositories, and then use the following command to start your new operating system.

qemu-system-i386 -cdrom myos.iso

This should start a new virtual machine containing only your ISO as a cdrom. If all goes well, you will be met with a menu provided by the bootloader. Simply select myos and if all goes well, you should see the happy words "Hello, Kernel World!" followed by some mysterious character.

Additionally, QEMU supports booting multiboot kernels directly without bootable medium:

qemu-system-i386 -kernel myos.bin

Testing your operating system (Real Hardware)

The program grub-mkrescue is nice because it makes a bootable ISO that works on both real computers and virtual machines. You can then build an ISO and use it everywhere. To boot your kernel on your local computer you can install myos.bin to your /boot directory and configure your bootloader appropriately.

Or alternatively, you can burn it to an USB stick (erasing all data on it!). To do so, simply find out the name of the USB block device, in my case /dev/sdb but this may vary, and using the wrong block device (your harddisk, gasp!) may be disastrous. If you are using Linux and /dev/sdx is your block name, simply:

sudo dd if=myos.iso of=/dev/sdx && sync

Your operating system will then be installed on your USB stick. If you configure your BIOS to boot from USB first, you can insert the USB stick and your computer should start your operating system.

Alternatively, the .iso is a normal cdrom image. Simply burn it to a CD or DVD if you feel like wasting one of those on a few kilobytes large kernel.

Moving Forward

Now that you can run your new shiny operating system, congratulations! Of course, depending on how much this interests you, it may just be the beginning. Here's a few things to get going.

Adding Support for Newlines to Terminal Driver

The current terminal driver does not handle newlines. The VGA text mode font stores another character at the location, since newlines are never meant to be actually rendered: they are logical entities. Rather, in terminal_putchar check if c == '\n' and increment terminal_row and reset terminal_column.

Adding Support for the Cursor to Terminal Driver

The current driver does not move the cursor from wherever it defaulted to. Moving the cursor is a bit more complicated than displaying text, since it requires using IO ports. See Text Mode Cursor for details on how to do this.

Implementing Terminal Scrolling

In case the terminal is filled up, it will just go back to the top of the screen. This is unacceptable for normal use. Instead, it should move all rows up one row and discard the upper most, and leave a blank row at the bottom ready to be filled up with characters. Implement this.

Rendering Colorful ASCII Art

Use the existing terminal driver to render some pretty stuff in all the glorious 16 colors you have available. Note that only 8 colors may be available for the background color, as the uppermost bit in the entries by default means something other than background color. You'll need a real VGA driver to fix this.

Calling Global Constructors

Main article: Calling Global Constructors

This tutorial showed a small example of how to create a minimal environment for C and C++ kernels. Unfortunately, you don't have everything set up yet. For instance, C++ with global objects will not have their constructors called because you never do it. The compiler uses a special mechanism for performing tasks at program initialization time through the crt*.o objects, which may be valuable even for C programmers. If you combine the crt*.o files correctly, you will create an _init function that invokes all the program initialization tasks. Your boot.o object file can then invoke _init before calling kernel_main.

Meaty Skeleton

Main article: Meaty Skeleton

This tutorial is meant as a minimal example to give impatient beginners a quick hello world operating system. It is deliberately minimal and doesn't show the best practices on how to organize your operating system. The Meaty Skeleton tutorial shows an example of how to organize a minimal operating system with a kernel, room for a standard library to grow, and prepared for a user-space to appear.

Going Further

Main article: Going Further on x86

This guide is meant as an overview of what to do, so you have a kernel ready for more features, without actually redesigning it radically when adding them.

Bare Bones II

Make your operating system self-hosting and then complete Bare Bones under your own operating system while following all the instructions. This is a five star exercise and you may need a couple of years to solve it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why the Multiboot header? Wouldn't a pure ELF file be loadable by GRUB anyway?

GRUB is capable of loading a variety of formats. However, in this tutorial we are creating a Multiboot compliant kernel that could be loaded by any other compliant bootloader. To achieve this, the multiboot header is mandatory.

Will GRUB wipe the BSS section before loading the kernel?

Yes. For ELF kernels, the .bss section is automatically identified and cleared (despite the Multiboot specification being a bit vague about it). For other formats, if you ask it politely to do so, that is if you use the 'address override' information from the Multiboot header (flag #16) and give a non-zero value to the bss_end_addr field. Note that using "address override" with an ELF kernel will disable the default behavior and do what is described by the "address override" header instead.

What is the state of registers/memory/etc. when GRUB calls my kernel?

GRUB is an implementation of the Multiboot specification. Anything not specified there is "undefined behavior", which should ring a bell (not only) with C/C++ programmers... Better check the Machine State section of Multiboot documentation, and assume nothing else.

I still get Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format from GRUB...

Chances are the Multiboot header is missing from the final executable, or it is not at the right location.

It may also happen if you use an ELF object file instead of an executable (e.g. you have an ELF file with unresolved symbols or unfixable relocations). Try to link your ELF file to a binary executable to get more accurate error messages.

I get Boot failed: Could not read from CD-ROM (code 0009) when trying to boot the iso image in QEMU

If your development system is booted from EFI it may be that you don't have the PC-BIOS version of the grub binaries installed anywhere. If you install them then grub-mkrescue will by default produce a hybrid ISO that will work in QEMU. On Ubuntu this can be achieved with: apt-get install grub-pc-bin.

See Also

Articles

• Books

External Links

• Multiboot Specification
• The POSIX standard

Category:Bare bones tutorials Category:C Category:C++