Image Creation Tool - First Steps
I’ve started working on a new personal project: GPT FAT Disk Image Tools. That’s a boring name for a boring (in a good way!) piece of software. It’s going to be a modest collection of simple tools for working with images of hard drives containing GPT Partition Tables where the first partition is formatted with a FAT Filesystem.
The problem it solves is the following. When doing x86 OS development, I frequently want to run my code in
an emulator/VM such as qemu. In order to boot an operating system on an emulator, one must present a
disk image for the emulator to boot from.
Modern PCs use a firmware interface named UEFI.
Compared to its predecessor BIOS, it presents a higher-level of abstraction
to boot code, and rather than loading and executing code from the
Master Boot Record
of your hard drive, it loads a file from one of a handful of pre-defined locations (such as /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI)
from the first partition of the hard drive. The hard drive must have a GPT partition table, and its first partition
must be formatted with a FAT filesystem (there appears to be some flexibility as to which FAT is used).
The process of creating a disk image containing a GPT partition table with a FAT-formatted partition
is harder than it needs to be.
The osdev wiki page on UEFI
gives a list of ways to create a UEFI-compatible disk image,
organized by OS and whether or not they require root.
I want my hobby OS to have a Makefile rule than builds a bootable disk image,
and running build tools as root is dangerous,
and there’s no reason creating or formatting a disk image should require root.
I frequently bounce between linux and freebsd, so I need a platform-independent solution.
GPT and FAT are both fairly simple and well-documented standards. So far I can decode GPT and FAT headers, and list the files in the root directory of of FAT12 and FAT16 partitions.