How to run a program without an operating system

Question

How do you run a program all by itself without an operating system running  Can you create assembly programs that the computer can load and run at startup  e g  boot the computer from a flash drive and it runs the program that is on the CPU

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Operating System as the inspiration  The operating system is also a program  so we can also create our own program by creating from scratch or changing  limiting or adding  features of one of the small operating systems  and then run it during the boot process  using an ISO image    For example  this page can be used as a starting point   How to write a simple operating system  Here  the entire Operating System fit entirely in a 512-byte boot sector  MBR    Such or similar simple OS can be used to create a simple framework that will allow us      make the bootloader load subsequent sectors on the disk into RAM  and jump to that point to continue execution  Or you could read up on FAT12  the filesystem used on floppy drives  and implement that    There are many possibilities  however  For for example to see a bigger x86 assembly language OS we can explore the MykeOS  x86 operating system which is a learning tool to show the simple 16-bit  real-mode OSes work  with well-commented code and extensive documentation   Boot Loader as the inspiration  Other common type of programs that run without the operating system are also Boot Loaders  We can create a program inspired by such a concept for example using this site   How to develop your own Boot Loader  The above article presents also the basic architecture of such a programs         Correct loading to the memory by 0000 7C00 address    Calling the BootMain function that is developed in the high-level language    Show       Hello  world        from low-level    message on the display       As we can see  this architecture is very flexible and allows us to implement any program  not necessarily a boot loader   In particular  it shows how to use the  mixed code  technique thanks to which it is possible to combine high-level constructions  from C or C    with low-level commands  from Assembler   This is a very useful method  but we have to remember that      to build the program and obtain executable file you will need the compiler and linker of Assembler for 16-bit mode  For C C   you will need only the compiler that can create object files for 16-bit mode    The article shows also how to see the created program in action and how to perform its testing and debug   UEFI applications as the inspiration  The above examples used the fact of loading the sector MBR on the data medium  However  we can go deeper into the depths by plaing for example with the UEFI applications      Beyond loading an OS  UEFI can run UEFI applications  which reside as files on the EFI System Partition  They can be executed from the UEFI command shell  by the firmware s boot manager  or by other UEFI applications  UEFI applications can be developed and installed independently of the system manufacturer       A type of UEFI application is an OS loader such as GRUB  rEFInd  Gummiboot  and Windows Boot Manager  which loads an OS file into memory and executes it  Also  an OS loader can provide a user interface to allow the selection of another UEFI application to run  Utilities like the UEFI shell are also UEFI applications    If we would like to start creating such programs  we can  for example  start with these websites   Programming for EFI  Creating a  Hello  World  Program   UEFI Programming - First Steps  Exploring security issues as the inspiration  It is well known that there is a whole group of malicious software  which are programs  that are running before the operating system starts   A huge group of them operate on the MBR sector or UEFI applications  just like the all above solutions  but there are also those that use another entry point such as the Volume Boot Record  VBR  or the BIOS      There are at least four known BIOS attack viruses  two of which were for demonstration purposes    or perhaps another one too   Attacks before system startup     Bootkits have evolved from Proof-of-Concept development to mass distribution and have now effectively become open-source software    Different ways to boot  I also think that in this context it is also worth mentioning that there are various forms of booting the operating system  or the executable program intended for this   There are many  but I would like to pay attention to loading the code from the network using Network Boot option  PXE   which allows us to run the program on the computer regardless of its operating system and even regardless of any storage medium that is directly connected to the computer   What Is Network Booting  PXE  and How Can You Use It

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How do you run a program all by itself without an operating system running    You place your binary code to a place where processor looks for after rebooting  e g  address 0 on ARM       Can you create assembly programs that the computer can load and run at startup   e g  boot the computer from a flash drive and it runs the program that is on the drive     General answer to the question  it can be done  It s often referred to as  bare metal programming   To read from flash drive  you want to know what s USB  and you want to have some driver to work with this USB  The program on this drive would also have to be in some particular format  on some particular filesystem    This is something that boot loaders usually do  but your program could include its own bootloader so it s self-contained  if the firmware will only load a small block of code   Many ARM boards let you do some of those things  Some have boot loaders to help you with basic setup   Here you may find a great tutorial on how to do a basic operating system on a Raspberry Pi   Edit  This article  and the whole wiki osdev org will anwer most of your questions http   wiki osdev org Introduction  Also  if you don t want to experiment directly on hardware  you can run it as a virtual machine using hypervisors like qemu  See how to run  hello world  directly on virtualized ARM hardware here

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I wrote a c   program based on Win32 to write an assembly to the boot sector of a pen-drive  When the computer is booted from the pen-drive it executes the code successfully - have a look here C   Program to write to the boot sector of a USB Pendrive This program is a few lines that should be compiled on a compiler with windows compilation configured - such as a visual studio compiler - any available version

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Runnable examples Let s create and run some minuscule bare metal hello world programs that run without an OS on   an x86 Lenovo Thinkpad T430 laptop with UEFI BIOS 1 16 firmware an ARM-based Raspberry Pi 3  We will also try them out on the QEMU emulator as much as possible  as that is safer and more convenient for development  The QEMU tests have been on an Ubuntu 18 04 host with the pre-packaged QEMU 2 11 1  The code of all x86 examples below and more is present on this GitHub repo  How to run the examples on x86 real hardware Remember that running examples on real hardware can be dangerous  e g  you could wipe your disk or brick the hardware by mistake  only do this on old machines that don t contain critical data  Or even better  use cheap semi-disposable devboards such as the Raspberry Pi  see the ARM example below  For a typical x86 laptop  you have to do something like   Burn the image to an USB stick  will destroy your data    sudo dd if main img of  dev sdX   plug the USB on a computer  turn it on  tell it to boot from the USB  This means making the firmware pick USB before hard disk  If that is not the default behavior of your machine  keep hitting Enter  F12  ESC or other such weird keys after power-on until you get a boot menu where you can select to boot from the USB  It is often possible to configure the search order in those menus    For example  on my T430  I see the following  After turning on  this is when I have to press Enter to enter the boot menu   Then  here I have to press F12 to select the USB as the boot device   From there  I can select the USB as the boot device like this   Alternatively  to change the boot order and choose the USB to have higher precedence so I don t have to manually select it every time  I would hit F1 on the  quot Startup Interrupt Menu quot  screen  and then navigate to   Boot sector On x86  the simplest and lowest level thing you can do is to create a Master Boot Sector  MBR   which is a type of boot sector  and then install it to a disk  Here we create one with a single printf call  printf   364 509s 125 252   gt  main img sudo apt-get install qemu-system-x86 qemu-system-x86 64 -hda main img  Outcome   Note that even without doing anything  a few characters are already printed on the screen  Those are printed by the firmware  and serve to identify the system  And on the T430 we just get a blank screen with a blinking cursor   main img contains the following    364 in octal    0xf4 in hex  the encoding for a hlt instruction  which tells the CPU to stop working  Therefore our program will not do anything  only start and stop  We use octal because  x hex numbers are not specified by POSIX  We could obtain this encoding easily with  echo hlt  gt  a S as -o a o a S objdump -S a o  which outputs  a o      file format elf64-x86-64   Disassembly of section  text   0000000000000000  lt  text gt      0    f4                      hlt  but it is also documented in the Intel manual of course    509s produce 509 spaces  Needed to fill in the file until byte 510    125 252 in octal    0x55 followed by 0xaa  These are 2 required magic bytes which must be bytes 511 and 512  The BIOS goes through all our disks looking for bootable ones  and it only considers bootable those that have those two magic bytes  If not present  the hardware will not treat this as a bootable disk    If you are not a printf master  you can confirm the contents of main img with  hd main img  which shows the expected  00000000  f4 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20                     00000010  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20                       000001f0  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 55 aa                 U   00000200  where 20 is a space in ASCII  The BIOS firmware reads those 512 bytes from the disk  puts them into memory  and sets the PC to the first byte to start executing them  Hello world boot sector Now that we have made a minimal program  let s move to a hello world  The obvious question is  how to do IO  A few options   ask the firmware  e g  BIOS or UEFI  to do it for us  VGA  special memory region that gets printed to the screen if written to  Can be used in Protected Mode   write a driver and talk directly to the display hardware  This is the  quot proper quot  way to do it  more powerful  but more complex   serial port  This is a very simple standardized protocol that sends and receives characters from a host terminal  On desktops  it looks like this   Source  It is unfortunately not exposed on most modern laptops  but is the common way to go for development boards  see the ARM examples below  This is really a shame  since such interfaces are really useful to debug the Linux kernel for example   use debug features of chips  ARM calls theirs semihosting for example  On real hardware  it requires some extra hardware and software support  but on emulators it can be a free convenient option  Example    Here we will do a BIOS example as it is simpler on x86  But note that it is not the most robust method  main S  code16     mov  msg   si     mov  0x0e   ah loop      lodsb     or  al   al     jz halt     int  0x10     jmp loop halt      hlt msg       asciz  quot hello world quot   GitHub upstream  link ld SECTIONS          The BIOS loads the code from the disk to this location         We must tell that to the linker so that it can properly        calculate the addresses of symbols we might jump to                  0x7c00       text                   start                 text             Place the magic boot bytes at the end of the first 512 sector                 0x1FE          SHORT 0xAA55           Assemble and link with  as -g -o main o main S ld --oformat binary -o main img -T link ld main o qemu-system-x86 64 -hda main img  Outcome   And on the T430   Tested on  Lenovo Thinkpad T430  UEFI BIOS 1 16  Disk generated on an Ubuntu 18 04 host  Besides the standard userland assembly instructions  we have    code16  tells GAS to output 16-bit code  cli  disable software interrupts  Those could make the processor start running again after the hlt  int  0x10  does a BIOS call  This is what prints the characters one by one    The important link flags are   --oformat binary  output raw binary assembly code  don t wrap it inside an ELF file as is the case for regular userland executables   To better understand the linker script part  familiarize yourself with the relocation step of linking  What do linkers do  Cooler x86 bare metal programs Here are a few more complex bare metal setups that I ve achieved   multicore  What does multicore assembly language look like  paging  How does x86 paging work   Use C instead of assembly Summary  use GRUB multiboot  which will solve a lot of annoying problems you never thought about  See the section below  The main difficulty on x86 is that the BIOS only loads 512 bytes from the disk to memory  and you are likely to blow up those 512 bytes when using C  To solve that  we can use a two-stage bootloader  This makes further BIOS calls  which load more bytes from the disk into memory  Here is a minimal stage 2 assembly example from scratch using the int 0x13 BIOS calls  Alternatively   if you only need it to work in QEMU but not real hardware  use the -kernel option  which loads an entire ELF file into memory  Here is an ARM example I ve created with that method  for the Raspberry Pi  the default firmware takes care of the image loading for us from an ELF file named kernel7 img  much like QEMU -kernel does   For educational purposes only  here is a one stage minimal C example  main c void main void        int i      char s       h    e    l    l    o         w    o    r    l    d        for  i   0  i  lt  sizeof s     i              asm                  quot int  0x10 quot       quot a quot    0x0e  lt  lt  8    s i                        while  1              asm     quot hlt quot              entry S  code16  text  global mystart mystart      ljmp  0    setcs  setcs      xor  ax   ax     mov  ax   ds     mov  ax   es     mov  ax   ss     mov    stack top   esp     cld     call main  linker ld ENTRY mystart  SECTIONS         0x7c00     text         entry o  text         text         data         rodata        bss start             COMMON vs BSS  https   stackoverflow com questions 16835716 bss-vs-common-what-goes-where           bss        COMMON        bss end               https   stackoverflow com questions 53584666 why-does-gnu-ld-include-a-section-that-does-not-appear-in-the-linker-script       sig   AT ADDR  text    512 - 2            SHORT 0xaa55          DISCARD             eh frame          stack bottom                0x1000      stack top         run set -eux as -ggdb3 --32 -o entry o entry S gcc -c -ggdb3 -m16 -ffreestanding -fno-PIE -nostartfiles -nostdlib -o main o -std c99 main c ld -m elf i386 -o main elf -T linker ld entry o main o objcopy -O binary main elf main img qemu-system-x86 64 -drive file main img format raw  C standard library Things get more fun if you also want to use the C standard library however  since we don t have the Linux kernel  which implements much of the C standard library functionality through POSIX  A few possibilities  without going to a full-blown OS like Linux  include   Write your own  It s just a bunch of headers and C files in the end  right  Right    Newlib Detailed example at  https   electronics stackexchange com questions 223929 c-standard-libraries-on-bare-metal 223931 Newlib implements all the boring non-OS specific things for you  e g  memcmp  memcpy  etc  Then  it provides some stubs for you to implement the syscalls that you need yourself  For example  we can implement exit   on ARM through semihosting with  void  exit int status          asm     volatile     quot mov r0   0x18  ldr r1    0x20026  svc 0x00123456 quot       as shown at in this example  For example  you could redirect printf to the UART or ARM systems  or implement exit   with semihosting   embedded operating systems like FreeRTOS and Zephyr  Such operating systems typically allow you to turn off pre-emptive scheduling  therefore giving you full control over the runtime of the program  They can be seen as a sort of pre-implemented Newlib    GNU GRUB Multiboot Boot sectors are simple  but they are not very convenient   you can only have one OS per disk the load code has to be really small and fit into 512 bytes you have to do a lot of startup yourself  like moving into protected mode  It is for those reasons that GNU GRUB created a more convenient file format called multiboot  Minimal working example  https   github com cirosantilli x86-bare-metal-examples tree d217b180be4220a0b4a453f31275d38e697a99e0 multiboot hello-world I also use it on my GitHub examples repo to be able to easily run all examples on real hardware without burning the USB a million times  QEMU outcome   T430   If you prepare your OS as a multiboot file  GRUB is then able to find it inside a regular filesystem  This is what most distros do  putting OS images under  boot  Multiboot files are basically an ELF file with a special header  They are specified by GRUB at  https   www gnu org software grub manual multiboot multiboot html You can turn a multiboot file into a bootable disk with grub-mkrescue  Firmware In truth  your boot sector is not the first software that runs on the system s CPU  What actually runs first is the so-called firmware  which is a software   made by the hardware manufacturers typically closed source but likely C-based stored in read-only memory  and therefore harder   impossible to modify without the vendor s consent   Well known firmwares include   BIOS  old all-present x86 firmware  SeaBIOS is the default open source implementation used by QEMU  UEFI  BIOS successor  better standardized  but more capable  and incredibly bloated  Coreboot  the noble cross arch open source attempt  The firmware does things like   loop over each hard disk  USB  network  etc  until you find something bootable  When we run QEMU  -hda says that main img is a hard disk connected to the hardware  and hda is the first one to be tried  and it is used   load the first 512 bytes to RAM memory address 0x7c00  put the CPU s RIP there  and let it run  show things like the boot menu or BIOS print calls on the display   Firmware offers OS-like functionality on which most OS-es depend  E g  a Python subset has been ported to run on BIOS   UEFI  https   www youtube com watch v bYQ lq5dcvM It can be argued that firmwares are indistinguishable from OSes  and that firmware is the only  quot true quot  bare metal programming one can do  As this CoreOS dev puts it   The hard part When you power up a PC  the chips that make up the chipset  northbridge  southbridge and SuperIO  are not yet initialized properly  Even though the BIOS ROM is as far removed from the CPU as it could be  this is accessible by the CPU  because it has to be  otherwise the CPU would have no instructions to execute  This does not mean that BIOS ROM is completely mapped  usually not  But just enough is mapped to get the boot process going  Any other devices  just forget it  When you run Coreboot under QEMU  you can experiment with the higher layers of Coreboot and with payloads  but QEMU offers little opportunity to experiment with the low level startup code  For one thing  RAM just works right from the start   Post BIOS initial state Like many things in hardware  standardization is weak  and one of the things you should not rely on is the initial state of registers when your code starts running after BIOS  So do yourself a favor and use some initialization code like the following  https   stackoverflow com a 32509555 895245 Registers like  ds and  es have important side effects  so you should zero them out even if you are not using them explicitly  Note that some emulators are nicer than real hardware and give you a nice initial state  Then when you go run on real hardware  everything breaks  El Torito Format that can be burnt to CDs  https   en wikipedia org wiki El Torito  28CD-ROM standard 29 It is also possible to produce a hybrid image that works on either ISO or USB  This is can be done with grub-mkrescue  example   and is also done by the Linux kernel on make isoimage using isohybrid  ARM In ARM  the general ideas are the same  There is no widely available semi-standardized pre-installed firmware like BIOS for us to use for the IO  so the two simplest types of IO that we can do are   serial  which is widely available on devboards blink the LED  I have uploaded   a few simple QEMU C   Newlib and raw assembly examples here on GitHub  The prompt c example for example takes input from your host terminal and gives back output all through the simulated UART  enter a character got  a new alloc of 1 bytes at address 0x0x4000a1c0 enter a character got  b new alloc of 2 bytes at address 0x0x4000a1c0 enter a character  See also  How to make bare metal ARM programs and run them on QEMU   a fully automated Raspberry Pi blinker setup at  https   github com cirosantilli raspberry-pi-bare-metal-blinker  See also  How to run a C program with no OS on the Raspberry Pi  To  quot see quot  the LEDs on QEMU you have to compile QEMU from source with a debug flag  https   raspberrypi stackexchange com questions 56373 is-it-possible-to-get-the-state-of-the-leds-and-gpios-in-a-qemu-emulation-like-t Next  you should try a UART hello world  You can start from the blinker example  and replace the kernel with this one  https   github com dwelch67 raspberrypi tree bce377230c2cdd8ff1e40919fdedbc2533ef5a00 uart01 First get the UART working with Raspbian as I ve explained at  https   raspberrypi stackexchange com questions 38 prepare-for-ssh-without-a-screen 54394 54394 It will look something like this   Make sure to use the right pins  or else you can burn your UART to USB converter  I ve done it twice already by short circuiting ground and 5V    Finally connect to the serial from the host with  screen  dev ttyUSB0 115200  For the Raspberry Pi  we use a Micro SD card instead of an USB stick to contain our executable  for which you normally need an adapter to connect to your computer   Don t forget to unlock the SD adapter as shown at  https   askubuntu com questions 213889 microsd-card-is-set-to-read-only-state-how-can-i-write-data-on-it 814585 814585 https   github com dwelch67 raspberrypi looks like the most popular bare metal Raspberry Pi tutorial available today    Some differences from x86 include   IO is done by writing to magic addresses directly  there is no in and out instructions  This is called memory mapped IO   for some real hardware  like the Raspberry Pi  you can add the firmware  BIOS  yourself to the disk image  That is a good thing  as it makes updating that firmware more transparent    Resources  http   wiki osdev org is a great source for those matters  https   github com scanlime metalkit is a more automated   general bare metal compilation system  that provides a tiny custom API

[assembly] How to run a program without an operating system?

Operating System as the inspiration

Boot Loader as the inspiration

UEFI applications as the inspiration

Exploring security issues as the inspiration

Different ways to boot

Examples related to assembly

Examples related to x86

Examples related to operating-system

Examples related to bootloader

Examples related to osdev