Boot & startup¶

Bootloader¶

On x86, Xelix uses GRUB 2 as bootloader. In theory, any bootloader that understands the Multiboot 2 standard should work. The kernel binary is a regular ELF file and gets loaded into memory using the ELF program headers.

The Multiboot 2 standard also specifies a number of tags the kernel can leave in the beginning of the binary to request certain information or behaviour from the bootloader. These are located in src/boot/i386-boot.asm. Xelix only sets the Framebuffer request tag.

Xelix uses a linker script for LD (src/boot/i386-linker.ld for x86) to ensure it’s always loaded at 0x100000. The linker script also ensures the multiboot headers are always at the beginning of the binary, and provides the code with __kernel_start and __kernel_ènd symbols.

Early startup¶

After GRUB is done, it hands control to the entry function _start in src/boot/i386-boot.asm. The assembly snippet stores the multiboot magic and header pointer left in CPU registers by GRUB, sets up the kernel stack and hands control to main() in src/boot/init.c.

After the intialization routines have been run, the init program will be added to the scheduler and started. The init process can be set using the init=/usr/bin/foo command line argument.