BrokenThorn Entertainment

include but may not be limited to scheduling, multi-threading, introduction to MP systems, init and idle process, shared resources, mutual exclusion, concurrent programming, security, and kernel shared data.

Sounds good, mike. Nice to hear you're still working on this great series.

I guess everyone's kind of waiting for mike to put up the next chapter and doesn't want to 'pollute' the forums with random discussions.

utsav_popli wrote:access bit 7 (bit 47 of descriptor ) says: it should be set to 0 if we are not using virtual mode
But we are setting this bit, why ?

db 10011010b ; access

You basically answered your own question; We're going to run in virtual mode, so the bit needs to be set.

Personally, I use a hex editor to put the bootsector on a floppy disk.
Gives me total control over what's written and what not.

A good, free hex editor is HxD, which I personally use for, among others, the aforementioned purpose.

Sorry to just repeat the others, but... Any E.T.A. on the next chapter, or the current chapter's demo?

Hello i don't understand why we need to disable interrupts(with cli), i thought using hlt(to halt the cpu would be enough). In addition why do we need to null ds and es? hlt halts the processor until the next interrupt See why we need to disable interrupts? If we wouldn't use cli, then the cpu woul...

Well, I haven't done any FAT32 programming either, but as far as I've read it, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 all share the same directory/file structures.
The (optional) FAT32 long file names are implemented using specially crafted directory entries. Wikipedia has some info on that, too.

Your assumption for the FAT offset in the tutorials is correct. Most floppies have only one reserved sector. But to be certain, you could, of course assign fatOffset to be the value of bootsector->Bpb.ReservedSectors As for FAT32, I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#BPB has ...

I recently migrated my code from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010, and now I get these undefined references: unresolved external symbol _exit referenced in function "void __cdecl kernel_entry(struct multiboot_info *)" (?kernel_entry@@YAXPAUmultiboot_info@@@Z) SysCore\Kernel\entry.obj Kernel ...

Well now the problem is that I am getting an invalid instruction error? And I am using Visual Studio 2008 professional edition. The switch /align:512 is not recognized by the compiler but im not sure why? Where did you try and put the /ALIGN:512 command? It's supposed to be in the LINKER command-li...

After having some issues with PartCopy on my (32-bit) development PC, I decided to use a Hex Editor to directly write the bootsector to my floppy disk. The hex editor I use is called HxD and is free to download at http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ . An advantage of using the hex editor is that I can see ex...

No, it's not. Although activity has been exceptionally low in the past few months.

The last post in this thread was, indeed, in 2010, but other threads have seen more recent activity.
It's just that we're basically all waiting for Mike to add the next chapter.

I have yet to come across a compiler that looks at variable usage to determine the optimal storage size. However, more often than not, you'll be looking at a Speed/Size trade-off. For example, on a 32-bit processor, 32-bit reads/write are the fastest memory operations- even faster if the addresses a...

Hi, I have queries about memory management and higher half kernels which have been troubling me for quite some time. 1. The tutorial mentions - A Higher Half Kernel is a kernel that has a virtual base address of 2GB or above. My understanding is that if the kernel has virtual addresses V then all t...

Could you please tell how the kernel size is calculated and why is it multiplied by 512 when passing it to pmm_deinit_region . When the bootloader is reading the kernel into memory, it does that one sector (512 bytes) at a time. It keeps track of the amount of sectors that it read, and passes that ...