pdboot is a collection of bootloaders that are in the public domain. Currently, the project contains a Master Boot Record, and a Volume Boot Record for ext2, written by Mark Raymond.
The bootloaders are written in NASM x86 assembly. On a Debian/Ubuntu based system, running
sudo apt-get install build-essential nasm
is sufficient to install everything needed to build pdboot. To build, run
make
in the root of this repository.
The tests use Python 3, pytest and Bochs. To install pytest on a Debian/Ubuntu based system, run
sudo apt-get install python3-pytest
The version of Bochs in the package repositories usually isn't compiled with the debugging features that pdboot tests use, so you will need to compile Bochs yourself. This configuration will work with pdboot tests:
LIBS=-lpthread ./configure --enable-x86-64 --enable-smp --enable-all-optimizations --enable-vmx=2 --enable-svm --enable-avx --enable-evex --enable-usb --enable-usb-ohci --enable-ne2000 --enable-pnic --enable-e1000 --enable-debugger --disable-debugger-gui --with-nogui --without-x11
make
Once you have compiled Bochs, the test framework needs to know where to find it. This is done
through tests/config.py. tests/default_config.py provides a template for what this file should
look like. Then, running
make test
will run all the tests.