0

I'm trying to set up a working environment for assembling a bootloader and compiling and linking a simple kernel according to this page: enter link description here

So far everything went well, however I can't seem to work around this linker error:

C:\Users\----\Desktop\>ld -T linker.ld -o kernel.bin --oformat binary loader.o kernel.o
ld: cannot perform PE operations on non PE output file 'kernel.bin'.

The ld manual pages are in my opinion far too cryptic, and don't give any answers to this particular error message.

(I'm using Windows 7 64 bit)

Janx
  • 3
  • 1
  • Compiling a kernel on Windows is a hell though not impossible. –  Jun 19 '11 at 21:52
  • It's already compiled. My problem lies in the linking process. – Janx Jun 19 '11 at 21:56
  • Linking is a part of the compilation process, and it is the actual part I was mentioning by the word "hell". :) –  Jun 19 '11 at 21:58

1 Answers1

0

I have gone through some of that OSDev article, but on a Linux machine. First, I should point out the second sentence of the preface states you should set up a GCC Cross Compiler since you are on a Windows machine. But I believe specifically your error about the PE output file has to do with how ld is configured for Windows vs. Linux. Linux uses the ELF format for executable files, while Windows uses the PE format. These are two very different ways of representing a program/executable file. For the OSDev tutorial, you need to link the kernel in ELF format.

If you follow the article on setting up a GCC cross compiler, you should come to the section on building 'binutils.' Make sure your target is set up to be i586-elf. Continue following the article and you should be able to set up the linker ld to link to an ELF target instead of PE format.

Chris
  • 2,786
  • 1
  • 28
  • 31
  • Also one may user DJGPP utils. DJGPP toolkit contains such useful programs as ld86, as86 and gcc :-) And of course they are crosscompiling ready. – George Gaál Jun 20 '11 at 01:14