MinGW

What is MingW

MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) is a port of several GNU utlities to the Windows console environment, including GCC. It is less sophisticated than Cygwin, but more compact and has a lower overhead. It is most widely used in conjunction with the Dev-C++ and CodeBlocks? IDE.

Note that

• MinGW is a 10+ megabyte download and, like Cygwin, now requires a helper DLL (MSYS-1.0.DLL). So it's no longer "minimal".
• MinGW 'make' uses 'sh' as the shell if it finds 'sh' on the path. This is the Wrong Thing. DJGPP 'make' works better: it looks at the SHELL and COMSPEC environment variables.

How can i use it for OSDev'ing ?

Really, you're advised not to use MinGW for OSDeving, but instead to use Cygwin. MinGW has a collection of issues that make it poorly suited for our needs:

1. (GCC 2.95) ld -r -d ... doesn't get rid of all the common variables.
2. (GCC 2.95) BSS size is stored in the wrong location of the section header, so MinGW does not correctly interoperate with NASM.
3. ld -Ttext=NNN ... doesn't put the .text section at the correct address unless you also use the --image-base=0 option.
4. Linker claims to support ELF, but says "PE operations on non PE file" if you try to use ELF.

But if you write a link script, you'll still be able to make it able to be a Multiboot-kludge compatible kernel. If you are interested you can visit FreeDOS-32 and its kernel can be compiled by MingW.

/* The link script
 ( Note: the format should be "pe-i386" instead of
   "pei-i386" to ged rid of the "MZ" header. text
   and data sections should be close to each other. )
*/
OUTPUT_FORMAT("pe-i386")
ENTRY(start)
SECTIONS
{
 .text :
 {
        *(.text)
 }
 .data ADDR(.text) + SIZEOF(.text) :
 {
        *(.data)
        *(.data2)
        *(.rdata)
        __data_end__ = . ;
 }
 .bss ADDR(.data) + SIZEOF(.data) :
 {
        *(.bss)
        *(COMMON)
        __bss_end__ = . ;
 }
}

ChrisGiese tip-toed around the bugs and got his kernel to build with MinGW: http://my.execpc.com/~geezer/os/index.htm#borealis

Related Threads: Osdeving with MinGW