Wait, is that a blog of some sort?

So, the thing is; sometime around last year, I decided to write a simple kernel. Just for fun. The thing is called xdillah, it’s n my github profile and is ridiculously incomplete as of now. I was actively developing it some time around last summer, and here’s a very late post mortem about a bug I encountered sometime last August (or September or something). Oh, also, when developing, I extensively used JamesM’s tutorials (the link changes every now and then) and osdev.org. Both great resources.

So, when you’re doing kernel development, you generally need to have some sort of basic I/O for things like printf, puts etc. So I impleented some basic I/O functionality there, no problem. Then, one day, suddenly, some of the stuff I was printing out just stopped being displayed correctly. At that time, I hadn’t been able to hook a debugger to qemu where I was testing my kernel, so the obvious solution was good old printf-debugging. But the problem was; how do you printf debug when the printf routine is your problem? The answer is; you add another function to write out to your serial port (qemu redirects serial port output to stdout), check that it works; and then continue with serial port debugging!

So, when I was serial port debugging my printf routine, I was just putting serial port put statements around the code. After a bit of playing around, I noticed one peculiar thing: None of the statements were outputting anything to the serial port when there was a bug in the execution! After a lot of googling around, I found the culprit: when gcc does optimization, it turns single argument printf calls or printf("%s", asd) calls into calls to the puts function. So, turns out my printf implementation was fine, my puts implementation was the actual problem. However; one problem remained, the puts implementation is so simple that it obviously has no weird behavior. Sio the defect remains to this day.

In the end; I was able to work around this by replacing all the single argument printf calls within my code into printf("%s \n", asd)s and was able to disable that ‘feature’. However, the original bug in the puts remains there and boggles my mind to this day. I thought that was a pointer issue; but the strings print just fine when they are printf‘d just fine. How can such a simple implementation have such a bug?