Making a little bootloader OS to test out some assembly.
Caution
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
This project is a work in progress and will probably stay a work in progress forever. Expect to not see many commits or updates often, as this is a project that I will easily burn out on. See my last attempt for reference.
- Entered protected mode! I have access to all 4GB of memory, and I can use the full 32-bit instruction set.
- Printing strings via functions (both 16-bit and 32-bit, check out print16.asm and print32.asm)
- Handling keyboard inputs and printing characters (Real mode with BIOS interrupts, Protected mode with the keyboard controller)
- Handling special keypress cases such as moving the cursor using the arrow keys, enter to move to the next line, and the backspace key to move back and delete the last character.
(Only in real mode at the moment, See the comments in printTest32.asm for more information on what i'm doing for protected mode/32-bit)
Note that I am writing directly to video memory, so I am unable to actually see what is there.
To build the project, you need to have the following tools installed:
- NASM (for assembling the bootloader)
- QEMU (for running the bootloader in a virtual machine)
- dd (for creating the bootable image)
- gcc (which includes ld) (for compiling and linking C code, when we get there)
Due to the fact that many tools such as dd are not available or have suitable replacements on Windows, I have switched to using WSL2 for building and running this project.
If you are on any distribution of Linux, you can move ahead and install the tools using your package manager.
To build the project, you can either use the provided build.sh script or run the commands manually.
The script will assemble the boot.asm file, create a bootable image, and run it in QEMU.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
NASM is licensed under the Simplified BSD license.
QEMU is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0.
GNU Coreutils and Binutils (which include tools such as gcc, ld, and dd) are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.