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About

The loader is a multiboot compliant binary which is loaded by GRUB on startup. The binary is loaded to 0x00100000. It itself reserves some memory (in its BSS) which it uses as it’s own stack.

The purpose of this loader is to provide a basic memory setup and load the kernel binary to the expected start location.

  1. Memory setup

    A basic GDT is loaded which contains only kernel segment & data descriptors. Information from the GRUB memory map is interpreted to find all free physical memory and the physical memory allocator g_bitmap_page_allocator is initialized.

  2. Paging

    A page directory is allocated. The directory maps recursively. The memory from 0x00000000 to the end of all memory used by the loader is identity-mapped. The remaining multiboot-modules get relocated so they are mapped after the end of the loader binary.

  3. Loading kernel

    The kernel itself is a simple ELF32 binary which has 0xC0000000 as its start address. The loader searches for the module at "/boot/kernel" and loads it. The page tables in the kernel area are pre-allocated and zeroed. An initialization stack is allocated after the kernel image and after the stack the kernel heap is allocated with an initial size of 16MiB.

  4. Enter kernel main

    The loader finally switches to the prepared kernel stack and enters the kernels main entry function.

Memory layout

When entering the kernel, the initial page directory is layout as follows:

Loader Prepared Memory

For visualization, the sizes of each area are greatly exaggerated; actually the empty memory is much larger than depicted.