It is possible to pull up a debugger session when running a virtualization with qemu. Under the hood there seems to be gdb. This is very convenient, if you happen to know how to use gdb. Which is not super intuitive, I had forgotten some of it although I had worked with it quite a bit two weeks ago.

I imagine how tedious it must have been to program in this way without virtualization. You write you program, then spend 30 minutes (?) copying it to a drive, start the computer, and if you’re lucky it works. The whole preparation is now done by one command, qemu-system-i386. I’m not sure whether I would’ve had to patience back in these days. But what we did was quite fun so far.

Saul taught as “part 2” of his four part bootloader bootcamp. Our goal was this time to pull up another program from the disk, namely the kernel, to get to the next stage, the protected mode. One very insightful question was asked by Dominic, “what year are we in?”. It’s kind of fascinating that these techniques are almost 30 years old. The Linux Kernel was written in 1992, for example. We don’t see this anymore, but the low level process under the hood to pull up an operating system did not change much (at least from my current perspective).

In the afternoon I went to fetch someone from the airport. I was in the rush hour (unexpectedly…) so I was a bit late according to the time I had originally planned. In the last six weeks I did not use a phone, this was the first time that I really felt the need of it. I was worried, that I would miss the person that I had to fetch. Solution: Buy some internet at the airport, message someone to call the number of the arriving guest. Modern times.