Zeanix

Current State of Zeanix

THIS REPO HAS BEEN ARCHIVED. If you want a kernel from me, see Seanix.

Making a Bootable *.iso File

Requirements

The following commands only work on a Linux, or potentially other *nix system, and the following must be installed:

• Custom GCC (see GCC and Binutils below)
• Custom Binutils (see GCC and Binutils below)
• GNU Make (Debain/Ubuntu/Mint: make; Arch: base-devel (or make))
• GRUB (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint: grub; Arch: grub)

GCC and Binutils

Download the latest tarballs for both GCC (preferably 12.1) and Binutils (preferably 2.38), then extract the tarballs. Within the commands below, there is an option for both GCC's and Binutils' configure scripts, --target=i686-elf. If you are planning on building for a different architecture, replace i686 (e.g, --target=x86_64-elf). There is also another configure option, --prefix=/usr/local. This can be changed to /, /usr, or anything custom (such as ~/x-tools), as long as the $PREFIX/bin folder is in the $PATH environment variable that you're building with (e.g, with $PREFIX=~/x-tools, run export PATH=$PATH:~/x-tools/bin).

Run the following commands within the GCC directory (Note, you are building GCC from source and this may take a while):

$ mkdir -pv build && cd build
$ ../configure --target=i686-elf --prefix=/usr/local --disable-nls --enable-languages=c,c++ --without-headers
$ make all-gcc
$ make all-target-libgcc
# make install-gcc && make install-target-libgcc

Run the following commands within the Binutils directory (Note, you are building Binutils from source and this may take a while):

$ mkdir -pv build && cd build
$ ../configure --target=i686-elf --prefix=/usr/local --with-sysroot --disable-nls --disable-werror
$ make
# make install

Commands

It is important that you are in the root directory of the repo, otherwise these commands will not funtion properly. Run the following commands in the root of the repo as a regular user:

make clean  # remove unwanted objects or pieces of build/
make iso    # create build/ and use it to create bootable iso

Running Qemu without debugging

It is important that you are in the root directory of the repo, otherwise these commands will not funtion properly. Run the following commands in the root of the repo as a regular user:

qemu-system-$(ARCH) -m 512 -serial file:debug.log -cdrom zeanix.iso

Debugging

It is important that you are in the root directory of the repo, otherwise these commands will not funtion properly. Run the following commands as a regular user to create a bootable ISO with debug information:

make clean  # remove unwanted objects or pieces of build/
make debug  # run GCC on all C files, but with "__K_DEBUG" defined and with debug symbols
            # it will create the iso automatically with GDB information

To debug with Qemu and GDB, on i686, make sure you have Qemu and GDB installed (any GDB install will work, including from the package manager). You can then debug with the following commands (in two separate shell instances):

qemu-system-i386 -s -S -no-shutdown -no-reboot -serial file:debug.log -m 512 -cdrom zeanix.iso # tty1
gdb # tty2

The options for Qemu will force it to wait for GDB, not reboot the guest upon triple fault, not close the instance upon shutdown, redirect serial output of the OS into a file called "debug.log" (it will only be invalid encoding if there is an error), and provide Zeanix with 512MB of RAM, while booting from the iso file created by Make. If GDB gives an error about $REPOROOT/.gdbinit or something similar not being auto-loaded for security, you can either disable this security or copy the commands in the .gdbinit file and paste them into GDB.