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Linux internals

Kernel booting process. Part 2.

We started to dive into linux kernel internals in the previous part and saw the initial part of the kernel setup code. We stopped at the first call of the main function (which is the first function written in C) from arch/x86/boot/main.c. Here we will continue to research of the kernel setup code and see what is protected mode, some preparation for transition to it, the heap and console initialization, memory detection and many many more. So... Let's go ahead.

Protected mode

Before we can move to the native Intel64 Long mode, the kernel must switch the CPU into protected mode. What is it protected mode? Protected mode was first added to the x86 architecture in 1982 and was the main mode of Intel processors from 80286 processor until Intel 64 and long mode. Main reason to move from the real mode that there is very limited access to the RAM. As you can remember from the previous part, there is only 2^20 bytes or 1 megabyte, or even less 640 kilobytes.

Protected mode brought many changes, but main is another memory management. 24-bit address bus was replaced with 32-bit address bus. It gives 4 gigabytes of physical address. Also paging support was added which we will see in next parts.

Memory management in the protected mode is divided into two, almost independent parts:

Segmentation
Paging

Here we can see only segmentation. As you can read in previous part, address consists from two parts in the real mode:

Base address of segment
Offset from the segment base

And we can get physical address if we know these two parts by:

PhysicalAddress = Segment * 16 + Offset

Memory segmentation was completely redone in the protected mode. There are no 64 kilobytes fixed-size segments. All memory segments described by Global Descriptor Table (GDT) instead segment registers. GDT is a structure which contains in memory. There is no fixed place for it in memory, but it's address stored in the special register - GDTR. Later, when we will see the GDT loading in the linux kernel code. There will be operation for loading it in memory, something like:

lgdt gdt

where lgdt instruction loads base address and limit of global descriptor table to the GDTR register. GDTR is 48-bit register and consists of two parts:

size - 16 bit of global descriptor table;
address - 32-bit of the global descriptor table.

Global descriptor table contains descriptors which describes memory segment. Every descriptor is 64-bit. General scheme of descriptor is:

31          24        19      16              7            0
------------------------------------------------------------
|             | |B| |A|       | |   | |0|E|W|A|            |
| BASE 31..24 |G|/|L|V| LIMIT |P|DPL|S|  TYPE | BASE 23:16 | 4
|             | |D| |L| 19..16| |   | |1|C|R|A|            |
------------------------------------------------------------
|                             |                            |
|        BASE 15..0           |       LIMIT 15..0          | 0
|                             |                            |
------------------------------------------------------------

Don't worry, i know that it looks little scary after real mode, but it's easy. Let's look on it closer:

Limit (0 - 15 bits) defines a length_of_segment - 1. It depends on G bit.

if G (55-bit) is 0 and segment limit is 0 - size of segment - 1 byte
if G is 1 and segment limit is 0 - size of segment 4096 bytes
if G is 0 and segment limit is 0xfffff - size of segment 1 megabyte
if G is 1 and segment limit is 0xfffff - size of segment 4 gigabytes

Base (0-15, 32-39 and 56-63 bits) defines physical address of segment's start address.
Type (40-47 bits) defines type of segment and kinds of access to it. Next S flag specifies descriptor type. if S is 0 - this segment is system segment, if S is 1 - code or data segment (Stack segments are data segments which must be read/write segments). If segment is a code or data segment, it can be one of the following access types:

|           Type Field        | Descriptor Type | Description
|-----------------------------|-----------------|------------------
| Decimal                     |                 |
|             0    E    W   A |                 |
| 0           0    0    0   0 | Data            | Read-Only
| 1           0    0    0   1 | Data            | Read-Only, accessed
| 2           0    0    1   0 | Data            | Read/Write
| 3           0    0    1   1 | Data            | Read/Write, accessed
| 4           0    1    0   0 | Data            | Read-Only, expand-down
| 5           0    1    0   1 | Data            | Read-Only, expand-down, accessed
| 6           0    1    1   0 | Data            | Read/Write, expand-down
| 7           0    1    1   1 | Data            | Read/Write, expand-down, accessed
|                  C    R   A |                 |
| 8           1    0    0   0 | Code            | Execute-Only
| 9           1    0    0   1 | Code            | Execute-Only, accessed
| 10          1    0    1   0 | Code            | Execute/Read
| 11          1    0    1   1 | Code            | Execute/Read, accessed
| 12          1    1    0   0 | Code            | Execute-Only, conforming
| 14          1    1    0   1 | Code            | Execute-Only, conforming, accessed
| 13          1    1    1   0 | Code            | Execute/Read, conforming
| 15          1    1    1   1 | Code            | Execute/Read, conforming, accessed

As we can see first bit is 0 for data segment and 1 for code segment. Next three bits EWA are expansion direction (expand-dow segment will grow down, more about it you can read here), write enable and accessed for data segments. CRA bits are conforming (A transfer of execution into a more-privileged conforming segment allows execution to continue at the current privilege level), read enable and accessed.

DPL (descriptor privilege level) defines the privilege level of the segment. I can be 0-3 where 0 is the most privileged.
P flag - indicates is segment presented in memory or not.
AVL flag - Available and reserved bits.
L flag - indicates whether a code segment contains native 64-bit code. If 1 than code segment executes in 64 bit mode.
B/D flag - default operation size/default stack pointer size and/or upper bound.

Segment registers doesn't contain base address of the segment as in the real mode. Instead it contains special structure - segment selector. Selector is a 16-bit structure:

-----------------------------
|       Index    | TI | RPL |
-----------------------------

Where Index shows the index number of the descriptor in descriptor table. TI shows where to search the descriptor: in the global descriptor table or local. And RPL is privilege level.

Every segment register has visible and hidden part. When selector is loaded into one of the segment registers, it will be stored into visible part. Hidden part contains base address, limit and access information of descriptor which pointed by the selector. There are following steps for getting physical address in the protected mode:

Segment selector must be loaded in one of the segment registers;
CPU tries to find (by GDT address + Index from selector) and loads descriptor into the hidden part of segment register;
Base address (from segment descriptor) + offset will be linear address of segment which is physical address (if paging is disabled).

Schematically it will look like this:

Algorithm for transition from the real mode into protected mode is:

Disable interrupts;
Describe and load GDT with lgdt instruction;
Set PE (Protection Enable) bit in CR0 (Control Register 0);
Jump to protected mode code;

We will see transition to the protected mode in the linux kernel in the next part, but before we can move to protected mode, we need to do some preparations.

Let's look on arch/x86/boot/main.c. We can see some routines there which make keyboard initialization, heap initialization and etc... Let's look on it.

Copying boot parameters into "zeropage"

We will start from the main routine in the main.c. First function which called in the main is a copy_boot_params. It copies kernel setup header into the field of boot_params structure which defined in the arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/bootparam.h.

boot_params structure contains struct setup_header hdr field. This structure contains the same fields as defined in linux boot protocol and filled by boot loader and also in the kernel building time. copy_boot_params function does two things: copies hdr from header.S to the boot_params structure in setup_header field and updates pointer to the kernel command line if the kernel was loaded with old command line protocol.

You can note that It copies hdr with memcpy function which is defined in the copy.S source file. Let's look on it:

GLOBAL(memcpy)
	pushw	%si
	pushw	%di
	movw	%ax, %di
	movw	%dx, %si
	pushw	%cx
	shrw	$2, %cx
	rep; movsl
	popw	%cx
	andw	$3, %cx
	rep; movsb
	popw	%di
	popw	%si
	retl
ENDPROC(memcpy)

Yeah, we just moved to C code and assembly again :) First of all we can see that memcpy and other routines which are defined here, starts and ends with the two macro: GLOBAL and ENDPROC. GLOBAL described in the arch/x86/include/asm/linkage.h which defines globl directive and label for it. ENDPROC described in the include/linux/linkage.h which marks name symbol as function name and ends with the size of the name symbol.

Implementation of the memcpy is easy. At first, it pushes values from si and di registers to the stack because their values will change in the memcpy, so push it in the stack to preserve their values. memcpy (and other functions in copy.S) uses fastcall calling conventions. So it gets incoming parameters from the ax, dx and cx registers. Call of memcpy looks as:

memcpy(&boot_params.hdr, &hdr, sizeof hdr);

So ax will contain address of the boot_params.hdr, dx will contain address of the hdr and cx will contain size of the hdr in bytes. memcpy puts address of boot_params.hdr to the di register and address of hdr to si and saves size in stack. After this it shifts to the right on 2 size (or divide on 4) and copies from si to di by 4 bytes. After it we restore size of hdr again, align it by 4 bytes and copy rest of bytes from si to di by one byte (if there is rest). Restore si and di values from the stack in the end and after this copying finished.

Console initialization

After the hdr has copied into the boot_params.hdr, next step is console initialization by call of console_init function which defined in the arch/x86/boot/early_serial_console.c.

It tries to find earlyptink option in the command line and if the search was successful, it parses port address and baud rate of the serial port and initializes serial port. Value of earlyprintk command line option can be one of the:

* serial,0x3f8,115200
* serial,ttyS0,115200
* ttyS0,115200

After serial port initialization we can see first output:

if (cmdline_find_option_bool("debug"))
		puts("early console in setup code\n");

puts definition is in the tty.c. As we can see it prints character by character in the loop with calling of putchar function. Let's look on putchar implementation:

void __attribute__((section(".inittext"))) putchar(int ch)
{
	if (ch == '\n')
		putchar('\r');

	bios_putchar(ch);

	if (early_serial_base != 0)
		serial_putchar(ch);
}

__attribute__((section(".inittext"))) means that this code will be in the .inittext section. We can find it in the linker file setup.ld.

First of all, put_char checks \n symbol and if it is, prints \r before. After it puts characters on VGA by bios with 0x10 interruption call:

static void __attribute__((section(".inittext"))) bios_putchar(int ch)
{
	struct biosregs ireg;

	initregs(&ireg);
	ireg.bx = 0x0007;
	ireg.cx = 0x0001;
	ireg.ah = 0x0e;
	ireg.al = ch;
	intcall(0x10, &ireg, NULL);
}

Where initregs takes biosregs structure and fills biosregs with zeros with memset function at first and than fills it with registers values.

	memset(reg, 0, sizeof *reg);
	reg->eflags |= X86_EFLAGS_CF;
	reg->ds = ds();
	reg->es = ds();
	reg->fs = fs();
	reg->gs = gs();

Let's look on the memset implementation:

GLOBAL(memset)
	pushw	%di
	movw	%ax, %di
	movzbl	%dl, %eax
	imull	$0x01010101,%eax
	pushw	%cx
	shrw	$2, %cx
	rep; stosl
	popw	%cx
	andw	$3, %cx
	rep; stosb
	popw	%di
	retl
ENDPROC(memset)

As you can read above, it uses fastcall calling conventions as the memcpy function, it means that function gets parameters from ax, dx and cx registers.

Generally memset is like a memcpy implementation. It saves value of di register on the stack and puts ax value into di which is the address of biosregs structure. Next is movzbl instruction, which copies dl value to the low 2 bytes of eax register. The rest 2 high bytes of eax will be filled by zeros.

The next instruction multiplies eax value on the 0x01010101. It needs because memset will copy by 4 bytes at the time. For example we need to fill structure with 0x7 byte with memset. eax will contain 0x00000007 value in this case. So if we multiply eax on 0x01010101, we will get 0x07070707 and now we can copy this 4 bytes into structure. memset uses rep; stosl instructions for copying eax into es:di.

The rest of the memset function does almost the same as memcpy.

After that biosregs structure filled with memset, bios_putchar calls 0x10 interruption which prints a character. After it checks was serial port initialized or not and writes a character there with serial_putchar and inb/outb instructions if it was set.

Heap initialization

After the stack and bss section were prepared in the header.S (see previous part), need to initialize the heap with the init_heap function.

First of all init_heap checks CAN_USE_HEAP flag from the loadflags kernel setup header and calculates end of the stack if this flag was set:

	char *stack_end;

	if (boot_params.hdr.loadflags & CAN_USE_HEAP) {
		asm("leal %P1(%%esp),%0"
		    : "=r" (stack_end) : "i" (-STACK_SIZE));

or in other words stack_end = esp - STACK_SIZE.

Than there is heap_end calculation which is heap_end_ptr or _end + 512 and check if heap_end greater that stack_end makes it equal.

From this moment we can use the heap in the kernel setup code. We will see how to use it and how implemented API for it in next posts.

CPU validation

The next step as we can see cpu validation by validate_cpu from arch/x86/boot/cpu.c.

It calls check_cpu function and passes cpu level and required cpu level to it and checks that kernel launched at the right cpu. It checks cpu's flags, presence of long mode (which we will see more details about it in the next parts) for x86_64, checks processor's vendor and makes preparation for еру certain vendor like turning off SSE+SSE2 for amd if they are missing and etc...

Memory detection

The next step is memory detection by detect_memory function. It uses different programming interfaces for memory detection like 0xe820, 0xe801 and 0x88. We will see only implementation of 0xE820 here. Let's look on detect_memory_e820 implementation from the arch/x86/boot/memory.c source file. First of all, detect_memory_e820 function initializes biosregs structure as we saw above and filled registers with special values for 0xe820 call:

	initregs(&ireg);
	ireg.ax  = 0xe820;
	ireg.cx  = sizeof buf;
	ireg.edx = SMAP;
	ireg.di  = (size_t)&buf;

ax register must contain number of the function (0xe820 in our case), cx register contains size of the buffer which will contain data about memory, edx must contain SMAP magic number, es:di must contain address of the buffer which will contain memory data and ebx must be zero.

The next is loop, where will be collected data about the memory. It starts from the call of the 0x15 bios interruption, which writes one line from the address allocation table. For getting the next line need to call this interruption again (what we do in the loop). Before the every next call ebx must contain value returned by previous value:

	intcall(0x15, &ireg, &oreg);
	ireg.ebx = oreg.ebx;

Ultimately, it makes iterations in the loop, collecting data from address allocation table and writes this data into array of e820entry array:

start of memory segment
size of memory segment
type of memory segment (which can be reserved, usable and etc...).

You can see the result of execution in the dmesg output, something like:

[    0.000000] e820: BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000000009fbff] usable
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x000000000009fc00-0x000000000009ffff] reserved
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00000000000f0000-0x00000000000fffff] reserved
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000100000-0x000000003ffdffff] usable
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x000000003ffe0000-0x000000003fffffff] reserved
[    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00000000fffc0000-0x00000000ffffffff] reserved

Keyboard initialization

The next step is initialization of the keyboard with the call of keyboard_init function. At first keyboard_init initializes registers with initregs function and call the 0x16 interruption for getting keyboard status. After this it calls the 0x16 again for setting repeat rate and delay.

Querying

The next couple of steps are queries of different parameters. We will not dive into details about these queries, but will back to the all of it in the next parts. Let's make a short look on this functions:

The query_mca routine calls 0x15 BIOS interruption for getting machine model number, sub-model number, BIOS revision level, and other hardware-specific attributes:

int query_mca(void)
{
	struct biosregs ireg, oreg;
	u16 len;

	initregs(&ireg);
	ireg.ah = 0xc0;
	intcall(0x15, &ireg, &oreg);

	if (oreg.eflags & X86_EFLAGS_CF)
		return -1;	/* No MCA present */

	set_fs(oreg.es);
	len = rdfs16(oreg.bx);

	if (len > sizeof(boot_params.sys_desc_table))
		len = sizeof(boot_params.sys_desc_table);

	copy_from_fs(&boot_params.sys_desc_table, oreg.bx, len);
	return 0;
}

It fills ah register with 0xc0 value and calls the 0x15 BIOS interruption. After the interruption execution it checks carry flag flag and if it set to 1, BIOS doesn't support MCA. If carry flag is et to 0, ES:BX will contain pointer to the system information table, which looks like this:

Offset	Size	Description	)
 00h	WORD	number of bytes following
 02h	BYTE	model (see #00515)
 03h	BYTE	submodel (see #00515)
 04h	BYTE	BIOS revision: 0 for first release, 1 for 2nd, etc.
 05h	BYTE	feature byte 1 (see #00510)
 06h	BYTE	feature byte 2 (see #00511)
 07h	BYTE	feature byte 3 (see #00512)
 08h	BYTE	feature byte 4 (see #00513)
 09h	BYTE	feature byte 5 (see #00514)
---AWARD BIOS---
 0Ah  N BYTEs	AWARD copyright notice
---Phoenix BIOS---
 0Ah	BYTE	??? (00h)
 0Bh	BYTE	major version
 0Ch	BYTE	minor version (BCD)
 0Dh  4 BYTEs	ASCIZ string "PTL" (Phoenix Technologies Ltd)
---Quadram Quad386---
 0Ah 17 BYTEs	ASCII signature string "Quadram Quad386XT"
---Toshiba (Satellite Pro 435CDS at least)---
 0Ah  7 BYTEs	signature "TOSHIBA"
 11h	BYTE	??? (8h)
 12h	BYTE	??? (E7h) product ID??? (guess)
 13h  3 BYTEs	"JPN"

Next we call set_fs routine and pass the value of es register to it. Implementation of the set_fs is pretty simple:

static inline void set_fs(u16 seg)
{
	asm volatile("movw %0,%%fs" : : "rm" (seg));
}

There is inline assembly which gets value of the seg parameter and puts it to the fs register. There are many functions in the boot.h, like set_fs, there are set_gs, fs, gs for reading value in it and etc...

In the end of query_mca it just copies table which pointed by es:bx to the boot_params.sys_desc_table.

The next is getting Intel SpeedStep information with the call of query_ist function. First of all it checks cpu level and if it is correct, calls 0x15 for getting info and saves result to boot_params.

The following query_apm_bios function which gets Advanced Power Management information from the BIOS. query_apm_bios calls the 0x15 BIOS interruption too, but with ah - 0x53 to check APM installation. After the 0x15 execution, query_apm_bios functions checks PM signature (it must be 0x504d), carry flag (it must be 0 if APM supported) and value of the cx register (if it's 0x02, protected mode interface supported).

The next it calls the 0x15 again, but with ax = 0x5304 for disconnecting APM interface and connects 32bit protected mode interface. In the end it fills boot_params.apm_bios_info with values obtained from the BIOS.

Note that query_apm_bios will be executed only if CONFIG_APM or CONFIG_APM_MODULE was set in configuration file:

#if defined(CONFIG_APM) || defined(CONFIG_APM_MODULE)
	query_apm_bios();
#endif

The last is query_edd function, which asks Enhanced Disk Drive information from the BIOS. Let's look on query_edd implementation.

First of all it reads edd option from kernel's command line and if it was set to off than query_edd just returns.

If EDD is enabled, query_edd goes over BIOS-supported hard disks and queries EDD information in the loop:

	for (devno = 0x80; devno < 0x80+EDD_MBR_SIG_MAX; devno++) {
		if (!get_edd_info(devno, &ei) && boot_params.eddbuf_entries < EDDMAXNR) {
			memcpy(edp, &ei, sizeof ei);
			edp++;
			boot_params.eddbuf_entries++;
		}
		...
		...
		...

where the 0x80 is the first hard drive and the EDD_MBR_SIG_MAX macro is 16. It collects data to the array of edd_info structures. get_edd_info checks that presence of EDD by invoking 0x13 interruption with ah is 0x41 and If EDD is presented, get_edd_info again calls 0x13 interruption, but with ah is 0x48 and si address of buffer where EDD informantion will be stored.

Conclusion

It is the end of the second part about linux kernel internals. In next part we will see setting of video mode and the rest of preparation before transition to protected mode and directly transition into it.

If you will have any questions or suggestions write me a comment or ping me at twitter.

Please note that English is not my first language, And I am really sorry for any inconvenience. If you will find any mistakes please send me PR to linux-internals.

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