Copyright (C) 2020 Andrea G. Monaco

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.  This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.


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mbdump is a small utility to dump information in a multiboot or
multiboot2 header. multiboot and multiboot2 are (incompatible)
standards that dictate the way a compliant bootloader (grub and grub2
being the most common examples) can start a compliant os.

mbdump is free software released under the GPL version 3 or later. It
uses C99 language and standard library plus the nonstandard memmem
function, so it's very portable. It is also agnostic of architecture
and endianness.

To compile, just run a "make". Give the program an os image as an
argument and it will print the information it finds. Note that kernel
images are sometimes compressed; you have to decompress them to make
them readable by this program. Also note that the Linux kernel is not
Multiboot compliant.

This program is still experimental. Take its output with a bit of
salt.

In the future I might add some editing features.


This is the first Multiboot specification
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html and
this is the second
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot2/multiboot.html


This program is maintained by Andrea Monaco.  Send suggestions, bug
reports and patches to andrea.monaco@autistici.org.