CREATEIMAGE

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (1L)
Updated: TeachOS Build Utilities
 

NAME

createimage - create operating system image suitable for placement on a boot disk  

SYNOPSIS

createimage [--extended] [--vm] <bootblock> <file> ...  

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the createimage program used to produce an image suitable for placement on a boot disk. When run, the result is placed in a file called image residing in the directory the command was invoked. The image can be placed on a boot disk by issuing 'cat image > /dev/sda' on the shell command-line, assuming you have supplied the bootblock code as one of the executable components. (Note: depending on whether you have other SCSI devices on your system or not, the USB flash device could be detected as /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc ...)

createimage parses each of the given executable files according to the ELF specification. Thus, the executable files must be compliant to the ELF standard of position independant linking.

The format of the image is fairly simple. The first 512 bytes of the file contains the code for the bootblock. The memory image of the entire OS follows the bootblock. The size of the OS (in sectors) is stored as a "short int" at location 3 in the image.

 

OPTIONS

--extended
Print extended information useful for debugging the operating system image, process placement in memory and so on. Provides detailed information on the size and position of each executable component in the image file.

--vm
This option tells createimage to produce an image that can be easily tailored to a virtual memory operating system. A structure, called directory , is placed at the end of the image file, describing where in physical memory the processes should be placed.
 

SEE ALSO

objdump(1), gcc(1), ld(1), gas(1)  

BUGS

The --extended switch must be placed prior to the --vm swith on the command-line.


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
SEE ALSO
BUGS

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 23:27:08 GMT, September 15, 2008