#SETTING UP IDA AND BOCHS 2.6.9 CODE#

You’ll find as and ld on any UNIX/Linux system, but not on Windows.

The GNU assembler and the GNU linker are ideal tools for our purposes, but they are not readily available for Windows. So: the next tool we’ll be using is the GNU linker, ld. It does all the math required to turn all references into numbers, so you don’t have to (a very good thing).

#SETTING UP IDA AND BOCHS 2.6.9 CODE#

It joins up all the code, and makes sure that all the references in that code (jumps, variables, memory references) actually point to the correct spot. The tool responsible for putting it all together is called a linker. This is because programs in assembly code (or any other language) more often than not consist of many source files, which must be combined into one executable.

But before that, the object file must be linked into an executable. An object file contains machine code that the processor can execute. View the series index Assembling & LinkingĪssembling code turns that code into an object file. This article is part of a series on toy operating system development. We’ll also use Windows as our development platform, which we’ll require some extra work to set things up. The GNU assembler is free, and any other tools we’ll use will also be free. Our code so far was written in for the GNU assembler, as, although we use the Intel syntax (which GNU supports) as this is easier on the eyes for most people (I like the GNU syntax, but if you’ve never used it, you’ll find that it requires looking at everything upside down). Before we move in, let’s create a development environment: a toolset that we can use to compile and test our code repeatedly (and when fiddling with low-level assembly code, you’ll find that “repeatedly” is the operative word here). We ended up with a piece of code that writes a message to the screen, initializes the drive system, waits for a key press, and reboots. In part 2 of this guide to writing your own toy operating system, we set out to write our own (floppy) disk boot sector in assembly code.

Setting up ida and bochs 2.6.9