Stevia Bootloader

Stevia is a lightweight, hobby bootloader written in Assembly and C, designed for educational purposes. It targets 686+ and aims to be simple, approachable, and understandable, focusing on minimalism and core functionality.

Features

Currently Implemented

• Stage 1 Bootloader: Loads from the Master Boot Record (MBR) and prepares the system for Stage 2.
• Stage 2 Bootloader: Loads the kernel into memory and passes control.
• Basic Filesystem Support: Initial filesystem recognition (details depend on implemented filesystem support).
• Memory Map Parsing: Detects available memory regions via BIOS interrupts.
• GDT Initialization: Sets up the Global Descriptor Table for protected/unreal mode.

Planned Features

• Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT) Setup: Setting up basic interrupt handling.
• Basic Keyboard Input: Initial support for capturing keystrokes.
• Filesystem Expansion: Support for additional filesystems.

Installation

Prerequisites

To build and run Stevia, you will need the following tools installed on your system:

• Assembler: NASM for assembling bootloader components, you could use a compatible assembler but YMMV.
• GNU make: For building the project.
• mtools: To access the FAT partition
• fdisk: To create disk images and setup partition tables
• dosfstools: FAT32 creation
• an x86 Emulator: Bochs is the primary dev target, but stevia should run on any x86 emulator/hardware with at least a Pentium 3 and 640KiB of memory.

Building and Running

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Nivirx/stevia.git
   cd stevia
   

2. Build the bootloader and create a bootable disk image:

   make
   

3. Run using Bochs:

   bochs -q -f bochsrc.txt
   

Project Goals

Stevia is intended to be a learning tool for those interested in low-level programming, focusing on understanding the basics of how a computer starts up and manages early system resources.

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License. See the LICENSE or COPYING file for more details.