Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 10:24:24 +0000 From: Sergey Lyubka <devnull@asitatech.ie> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Assembly, Kernels and Bootstraps Message-ID: <20020801102424.GC97092@yoda.asitatech.ie> In-Reply-To: <20020731161322.O5057-100000@boise.neuroflux.com> References: <20020731161322.O5057-100000@boise.neuroflux.com>
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This is exactly what I did some time ago. I wrote a simple program, that was able to boot from a floppy disk, switched to a protected mode and displayed some diagnostics. Then I became curious about 'magic jump' from sectors, segments, and all that stuff to files, syscalls etc.. I began to discover how FreeBSD does that. Although manpages was very helpful, they didn't describe the internals, and I didn't find any other descriptive documentation. So I decided to publish the results of my investigations, to what Terry pointed you. (btw, they are now a part of developers handbook, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/boot.html) The book about protected mode programming Terry has recommended might be very useful, I didn't read it (I have used Intel manuals and assembly book written by Sergey Zubkov, which is only in Russian, I guess) That question I presume is a sign of a more global need of good book describing FreeBSD internals and philosophy behind it. Linux community has an excellent 'Linux Device Drivers', 'Understanding The Linux Kernel' etc; why not FreeBSD community does have such source of knowledge ? Reading the source code is far not enough. It can reveal the technique, but leaves the phiosophy, historical issues and relationships with other suff out from scope. Respected FreeBSD gurus, please answer on this. Share your knowledge :-) What about you, Terry? regards, sergey On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 04:19:59PM -0400, Ryan Sommers wrote: > Greetings, > > Recently I became interested in researching and learning whatever I could > about how a computer boots and what is involved. There are probably better > places to get this information but since FreeBSD is my development > environment of choice I thought I would start here. -- Sergey Lyubka Asita Technologies Int, Galway, Ireland :wq To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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