osldr

osldr is a stage-2 bootloader for x86 machines (from i386 and up) that is able to boot operating systems from files in the ELF, PE/COFF, Multiboot 1 formats, or directly from disk by loading a bootsector. It only supports the FAT file format for reading from disks. It features an editable boot.ini file and a boot menu where the user can select one of the configured operating systems.

Prerequisites

• Before building, please make sure gcc and GNU binutils (as and ld) are installed. No other compilers or toolchains have been tested.
• If building on a 64-bit operating system, please make sure a 32-bit libgcc is available, e.g. by doing apt-get install gcc-multilib.

Building

To build, run cmake and make:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Running

Take the osldr raw binary produced in the build and place it in the root directory of a FAT-formatted partition or disk, and load it with a stage-1 bootloader. An example boot.ini file is provided that should be placed in the root directory of the partition or disk as well.

osldr expects to be loaded at a physical address of 0x8000. It expects to be passed control at this address (its entry point) in 16-bit real mode, with the following information in register eax about the drive it was booted from, in the same format as Multiboot's boot_device field:

bits 24 - 31: BIOS Drive number
bits 16 - 23: First  partition number (> 4 is extended partition)
bits  8 - 15: Second partition number (BSD partitions)
bits  0 -  7: Third  partition number (unused: 0xFF)