Talk:Babystep1

Do we need this?

Is this tutorial really needed? There are a few problems with it:

1. It's mainly an assembly tuorial and a poor one at that.

2. There's no new information in this series.

3. I've noticed that many people from IRC stumble across this and think it's what they need when they actually want the bare bones tutorial.

Any arguments in favour of it? --Love4boobies 20:56, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

I cannot really judge the quality of the tutorial. If it's bad, it should be improved. But I do feel we should keep it here. It does show what a bootloader does, how to set up CPU mode etc., whereas the Bare Bones tutorial shows how to get from GRUB into your main() - two very seperate things.

So keep, definitely, and improve, if necessary. (I haven't followed this tutorial myself, and anyway I'm not the one to judge the quality of anything written in ASM.) -- Solar 11:03, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

If its purpose is to explain assembly language (which it attempts to do several times - e.g., the useless attempt on somewhat explaining instruction encoding) then yes, it does that poorly. On the other hand, if its purpose is to be a tutorial on constructing boot loaders then I would like to point out that all it does is show a show a printing routine (the equivalent of that routine in C would be something like for (char *p = str; p != '\0'; ++p) putchar(*p); instead of puts(str); -- not really something people want to do) and switch to protected mode.

We have an article on constructing boot loaders, one on protected mode and one on the A20 gate (not covered by this series) - all of them with sample code. Readers might benefit more if they browse around. Of course, that's just my opinion. I obviously won't delete anything unless the other contributors agree with me. --Love4boobies 00:42, 9 November 2010 (UTC)