Bochs
tiny-bootstrap
| Bochs | tiny-bootstrap | |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 1 | |
| 734 | 109 | |
| 9.5% | - | |
| 9.7 | 0.0 | |
| 4 days ago | about 1 year ago | |
| C++ | Assembly | |
| GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | - |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Bochs
-
Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?
The following is a pretty decent historical page about the pre-(U)EFI MBR (Master Boot Record) boot process:
https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm
Note that EFI/UEFI -- occurred much later in time than MBR...
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
You might also wish to check out some emulators, most notably Bochs (https://bochs.sourceforge.io/) and QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/) because they simulate the boot process, and if you're in their debuggers, you should be able to inspect that process step by step -- but also more generally emulators for other machines/platforms/architectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_system_emulat...) -- because in general, most of those emulators should simulate the given machine/platform/architecture's boot process...
-
Can anyone recommend some good free tools for programming, debugging, and virtualization on Ubuntu?
With both of those you can make some really nice DOS programs. Which you can then run in bochs (not virtualized, but an emulator. Close enough :) ).
-
80286 ROM BIOS - open-source code base?
Just took a look myself, check this out:
tiny-bootstrap
-
Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?
I wrote an article on writing a tiny pseudo-bootloader a while back[0] that got a bit of traction on HN at the time; you may enjoy it as an accesible and fun stepping stoke into the space. There’s an accompanying GH repo[1] with all the resources you need to run it yourself :)
[0]: https://www.joe-bergeron.com/posts/Writing%20a%20Tiny%20x86%...
[1]: https://github.com/Jophish/tiny-bootstrap
What are some alternatives?
TinyBIOS - A mirror of TinyBIOS repository
tianocore
All-Stages-of-Linux-Booting-
linux-insides - A little bit about a linux kernel
rp2040-boot2 - Second stage bootloader for the RP2040, suitable for use with a Rust application.
8088_bios - BIOS for Intel 8088 based computers
QEMU - Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.
coreboot - Mirror of https://review.coreboot.org/coreboot.git. We don't handle Pull Requests.
GLaBIOS - A modern, scratch-built, open-source (GPLv3) alternative ROM BIOS for PC, XT, 8088 Clone or Turbo PCs.