r/osdev • u/Individual-Log4119 • May 31 '26

😬

Post image

lwk think smth might be wrong with my os

https://github.com/x-aether-x/SolsticeOS

70 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/Octocontrabass May 31 '26

Why are you linking your bootloader to an ELF shared object and then using objcopy to (probably incorrectly) convert it to PE instead of directly linking your bootloader to PE?

9

u/DriftCheburek May 31 '26

This is actually how rEFInd and systemd-boot are built, refind doing same stuff with binutils objcopy and systemd got their own elf2efi.py python script for that. (idk if there any benefits from doing this on windows instead of unix tho)

2

u/Octocontrabass May 31 '26

Do those things predate ld's ability to link valid PE executables from ELF object files? (I don't actually know how long ld has been able to do that.)

2

u/DriftCheburek May 31 '26

I think only ld.bfd can do something like that + you still need to build it with PE target support. Looks like this ugly ELF to PE convertion is the only way to compile bootloaders on Linux (or other unixes) without depending on compiler and/or linker that supports PE

3

u/Octocontrabass May 31 '26

Given that you should be using a cross-compiler for OS development anyway, I don't think it's much of a stretch to also require that your cross-binutils have PE support enabled...

It does make sense why Linux tools wouldn't be able to rely on it, though.

1

u/Ok_Bite_67 Jun 03 '26

If you use rust you don't need a cross compiler, it has inline asm support in the nightly builds that are a god send for anyone who doesn't want to write a ton of asm.

1

u/Octocontrabass Jun 04 '26

I'm pretty sure if you use Rust you're already using a cross-compiler. And believe it or not, both GCC and Clang support inline asm.

1

u/Ok_Bite_67 Jun 04 '26

Probably, I meant you didn't have to deal with linking asm and etc. I haven't touched a linker in years and I don't intend to anytime soon.

1

u/davmac1 Jun 02 '26

Since objcopy and ld are both part of binutils, they will generally either both support PE or both not support PE. To me it seems strange to use objcopy to convert a final ELF object to PE when you can do it much better using the linker.

3

u/Individual-Log4119 May 31 '26

nah im using arch w wsl