Writing Boot Sector Code (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Writing Boot Sector Code (2007)

susam.in

56 pointsmycask11 comments

At the time of this writing, most such code examples available on the web were meant for the Netwide Assembler (NASM). Very little material was available that could be tried with the readily available GNU tools like the GNU assembler (as)

That's largely because no one wants to use GNU/AT&T assembler syntax. In the official Intel syntax, the important 4 lines of code would be more like

    mov ax, 0b800h  ; ax = b800
    mov ds, ax      ; ds = ax
    mov byte ptr [0], 'A' ; ds:[0] = 'A'
    mov byte ptr [1], 1eh ; ds:[1] = 1e

...and I immediately feel compelled to optimise it to (186+)

    push 0b800h
    pop ds
    mov word ptr [0], 1e41h

Also, especially with newer CPUs and on a laptop, it's a good idea to put a HLT in the infinite loop, like so:

    idle:
        hlt
        jmp idle

A halt causes the CPU to spend most of the time waiting for an interrupt, instead of spinning in a tight loop and wasting far more power than necessary.

> no one wants to use GNU/AT&T assembler syntax

I am the one who enjoyed using AT&T syntax. It remainded me old-days PDP-11 assembler.

This is an obsolete way to do that. In UEFI you don't need to play with assembly, look:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-programming/hello.html

I agree UEFI is the way to go. Just curious, how do people debug their programs though? Older non-pc systems had really decent debuggers built in.

QEMU and Tianocore works in some cases.

There are couple ways. You can compile UEFI for QEMU (OVMF package or possibly compile coreboot with Tianocore payload). Another way is just output. UEFI gives you shell, so you can see output and in UEFI it's much easier to deal with this stuff.

If you use coreboot and libpayload it's much easier because it offers you built-in GDB server you can connect to via serial port.

Everyone who has done BIOS work thinks that UEFI is a bloated mess, to put it lightly. UEFI is itself an environment with comparable complexity to an operating system. Linus' posts about it are worth reading:

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html

The result should be generation of intermediate files and the final hello.efi program file of about 46KiB on a 64-bit system

That's bigger than the whole MS-DOS 3.2 kernel.

I still don't really understand the necessity of EFI

Boot sector programming has always seemed like ln of the cooler ways to play with writing lower level code,but am I wrong to assume it won't work on systems with UEFI?

It may work with UEFI if it's set to compatibility mode.

That's correct. UEFI firmware will execute a PE image (the same format that Windows executables use) on a FAT32 file system, and can access UEFI services to execute a kernel.

EDIT: as pointed out by a sibling comment, the UEFI firmware may support a CSM (compatibility support module) that can boot a legacy BIOS loader.

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