Have you ever wondered how an x86 machine boots? It's actually pretty straightforward — and now you can see it for yourself.

This project is a minimal kernel written from scratch in C, showing the bare essentials of how to boot, clear the screen, and print text — all without any OS.

• 🖥 Prints a message directly to the screen (via VGA text buffer).
• ⚙️ Boots on real hardware using GRUB2 (via Multiboot).
• 🔧 Runs perfectly inside QEMU (and probably other VMs too).
• 💡 Clean, beginner-friendly code for learning low-level OS dev.

• Create object files from kernel.asm and kernel.c:

nasm -f elf32 kernel.asm -o kasm.o
gcc -m32 -c kernel.c -o kc.o

• Link the object files:

ld -m elf_i386 -T link.ld -o iso/boot/kernel kasm.o kc.o

• Edit the grub.cfg file if you want to use one:

set timeout=15
set default=0

menuentry "Kernel 420" {
    multiboot /boot/kernel ro
    boot
}

• If you want to create the ISO:

grub-mkrescue -o kernel.iso iso/

Then to boot using qemu you can either :

1- Use the ISO:

qemu-system-i386 -cdrom kernel.iso

2- Use the binary directly:

qemu-system-i386 -kernel iso/boot/kernel

• An x86 computer.
• Packages:

sudo pacman -S qemu-full grub xorriso nasm ld gcc

note: you can also use qemu-base instead of qemu-full but you will need a VNC viewer of some kind to see the results.

• Packages (alt):

sudo pacman -S qemu-base grub xorriso nasm ld gcc tigervnc