Petrichor is the code name for my hobby OS-development project. At the moment the project includes a bootable floppy with a boot sector written in 16-bit x86 assembly, and a stage-2 image called STAGE2.BIN, written in 32-bit x86 assembly. The program in the boot sector loads and runs STAGE2.BIN from the floppy disk. The stage-2 image is a simple, toy program with demonstration commands.
To build this project, you willl need:
- NASM 2.12 (http://www.nasm.us/)
- GNU Binutils 2.26 (https://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/)
- GNU Mtools 4.0.17 (https://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/)
Nasm and GNU Mtools may be built and installed in the standard manner for
yoru system. GNU Binutils will have to be built for the i686-elf target.
To build GNU Binutils in this manner, pass the option --taget=i686-elf
when running its configure script. Make sure this custom build of GNU
Binutils doesn't clobber your system's installation if you have a version
of GNU Binutils installed already.
There are a few goals for the stage-2 image:
- Fit in 64 kibibytes, so that it can be loaded into a single segment by the stage-1 image.
- Comply with multiboot standard and load a kernel.
The demonstration aspects of the stage-2 image will eventually be moved into loadable programs, and a stage-3 kernel will be made to load and run them.