bones kernel

A small kernel built for learning bare-metal programming. Name subject to change.

Features

• BIOS bootloader
• VGA text mode printing in all 16 colors visible to the human eye
• Basic serial console input and output

Download

Visit the releases page to download a pre-built "floppy" image.

Running

The kernel has only been tested in QEMU so far. It may be possible to run on real hardware as long as it supports plain BIOS booting. Otherwise, you can test it in QEMU by running:

qemu-system-i386 -drive file=bones-xyz.bin,format=raw

Building

Requirements:

• nasm (2.00 or newer)

In order to build, you must have a gcc cross-compiler and toolchain targeting the i686-elf architecture, built with sysroot support (--with-sysroot). By default, the makefile searches ../cross/bin/, but the path to these binaries can be specified on the command line:

make BIN_DIR="/path/to/toolchain/bin"

You can build the entire kernel and bootloader by running make all install image. The makefile will generate an unformatted and unpartitioned disk image using dd, which can be directly booted in QEMU or possibly even on real hardware. The image is simply formatted as follows:

.----------------------.
| Boot sector          |
|----------------------|
|                      |
| Core bootloader code |
|                      |
|----------------------|
|                      |
| Kernel code          |
|                      |
'----------------------'

Contributing

Contributions are appreciated! Please read the short style guide before making a pull request.