Coded message on Twitter

11Sep09

A few minutes ago, I’ve sent a coded update to my Twitter timeline. The message was the following:

Cygwin/NASM->ELF OK. Cygwin/Gcc-RAW OK. Cygwin/LD->PE BAZDMEG!!! Reggel fordíthatok egy cross-compilert :S

To those who are not familiar with what I’m trying to do, and the terminology of it, well, here it goes.

As I mentioned in previous posts here, I’m trying to get into operating system development. My chosen platform would be Mac OS X, but until Mercurysquad finishes the Wi-Fi driver, I’ll stick with Windows. Unfortunately most of the tools best suited for OSDev are for Linux.

That’s where Cygwin comes in. Cygwin is a POSIX library for Windows, that allows running some *nix programs on Windows. I get the almost original GCC, Make, Ld, and so on.

NASM stands for Netwide Assembler, no need to say more on this.

The problem outlined in the above tweet is that I need an ELF-type binary file (Linux executable) as my kernel. NASM creates one for me. GCC creates a nice raw object file for me. And when I try to link them together, the Ld that comes with Cygwin takes the whole thing and turns it into a PE (Windows) executable. I almost cried when I saw the hex dump.

Well, anyhow, I’ll just have to compile a correct version of Ld for myself, tomorrow morning.

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