This post is roughly a summary of the obscure knowledge I learned about toolchains and relocatable code in the last couple of years by studying the code of the microkernels NOVA and Hedron, my professional hands-on experience with kernel development, and several learning projects. I present some of the “hard Read more…
A kernel should be relocatable by bootloaders as this is the only guarantee that it doesn’t interfere with addresses already in use by the firmware. This is especially true for the legacy boot flow on x86, i.e., without UEFI. Update 2024-01-29: I just published a new blog post focusing more Read more…
TLDR: for Multiboot2 you use module2 and for Multiboot1 module in GRUB config files. One of my projects of the last months was to build a prototype setup for kernels written in Rust. The kernel is Multiboot2-compliant and boots on x86_64 with UEFI as firmware. To test everything, I create Read more…
TLDR: GRUB can reference internal files via the volume specifier (memdisk), similar to external drives (hd0). GRUB has an undocumented but really convenient feature to include files/images (e.g., bootable kernels) directly into the GRUB installation itself. If you use $ grub-mkstandalone to store GRUB on a USB stick or a Read more…