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Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

#91

Post by rramadass »

ignoramous wrote: post #9

The gist is (which doesn't hold universally true), when the CPU is powered up, it initializes its internal RAM, loads in a pre-boot ROM, executes it. pre-boot ROM's job is to initialize whatever it has to, to bring in the initial bootloader which initializes RAM, finds a suitable bootloader program and loads it in. This program, also called second-stage bootloader , is an Operating System in its own right. It can und…

Very Nice; Thank You for all the links !

PS: Your profile which seems to be a cheat-sheet of various HN handles categorized into their areas of expertise is very useful too :-)

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

#93

Post by maldev »

Intel has opensource training on EFI/UEFI and the whole boot process. https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Traini... Alot of the other stuff is either outdated or not relevant for current stuff. Tianocore/EDK is pretty much the standard for dev on that level and this directly teaches that.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

#94

Post by vsupalov »

bcantrill wrote: post #73
vsupalov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way out of my depth! However, the stuff I saw the folks from Oxide [1] talk about comes to mind. Hardware stuff with Rust. If you want to look at a specific project, Hubris [2] is a kernel for "deeply-embedded" systems. [1] https://oxide.computer/blog/building-big-systems-with-remote... [2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris

Hubris is a part of booting on our systems in that it executes on both our root of trust and on our service processor -- but both of these execute long before the host CPU. To understand how we boot our host CPU (AMD Milan) on an Oxide compute sled, see my OSFC 2022 talk[0][1], as well as the episode of our Oxide and Friends podcast on holistic boot.[2] [0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bi…

Thanks a lot for sharing! I ended up watching the referenced "It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware" talk as well. Fascinating stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

#95

Post by RulerOf »

brokenmachine wrote: post #90

Anyone know where there's good info on how Windows boots? Like how it chooses which partition is booted? For the next time I want to change SSDs.

Suggest starting on wikipedia and spidering your way around the references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?

#96

Post by alexjm »

microtonal wrote: post #26
zekica wrote: post #14

Here are a couple of resources I think can help you: - old x86 PCs boot in BIOS mode: https://opensource.com/article/17/2/linux-boot-and-startup With BIOS, your PC initializes hardware and contains firmware drivers for reading disk drives. BIOS loads the first sector (MBR) from the selected boot drive to a fixed memory location and jumps to it. Everything else is up to the bootloader (BIOS still provides methods for…

Apple Silicon Macs: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl... https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW%3ABoot https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...

Another resource for how Apple silicon Macs boot is the "EFI Jumpstart" chapter of "Apple File System Reference", which starts off with a section about the boot process.

https://developer.apple.com/go/?id=apfs-file-format-spec

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