Hacking over and over...

Geek quote: "The size of a word is not a universal standard."

I loved the following papers and I'm sure you'll also like them.
Reading Recomendations...
- (Excellent document) Eric S. Raymond: How to become a hacker: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- (Read carefully) Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I also would like to share the way I solved the exercise 5 of MIT OS course...
Exercise 5. Trace through the first few instructions of the boot loader again and identify the first instruction that would "break" or otherwise do the wrong thing if you were to get the boot loader's link address wrong. Then change the link address in boot/Makefrag to something wrong, run make clean, recompile the lab with make, and trace into the boot loader again to see what happens. Don't forget to change the link address back and make clean again afterward!

Firstly, follow some details that may give you a better understanding of this exercise.
The Load address of a section is the memory address at which that section should be loaded into memory.
The Link address of a section is the memory address from which the section expects to execute.

As I said earlier, the BIOS goes through the list of available devices and performs the following action with each entry:
- Checks whether the device is bootable, and if so, loads the bootloader code into memory[1] and starts executing it.

[1]: The code of the bootloader is implicitly loaded at the physical address 0x7c00.
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I traced through the bootloader code, and I was wondering whether unconditional/conditional jumps would work properly or not.
However, I got the answer. These instructions use relative addressing (base + offset) instead of absolute addressing.
So regardless of position code, any jump instruction will always work in silence.

Follow some jump instructions (Both of them are conditional jumps):
    7c0e:    75 fa                    jne    7c0a <seta20.1>
    ....
    7c18:    75 fa                    jne    7c14 <seta20.2>

Now is time to change the link address and see what will happens... The link address is specified by the makefile of bootloader, so we only need to replace the current address.

$(V)$(LD) $(LDFLAGS) -N -e start -Ttext 0x8C00 -o $@.out $^

After cleaning and compiling the source code with the new parameter, let's take a look at the first instruction to see what happened.

00008c00 <start>:
    8c00:    fa                       cli   
    8c01:    fc                       cld 

Wow, it looks like our code will be loaded into another address of memory, though it's not the truth. 
BIOS always load the boot sector into memory at physical addresses 0x7c00, so instructions that depend on a specific address will not work as we expected. Trust and believe me, that's really bad.

Brace yourself for some bad news, the LGDT[1] instruction uses absolute addressing instead. Given this information, the bootloader won't work properly if the link address is wrong.

lgdt    gdtdesc

LGDT takes as argument the address of a structure containing both the base address and limit of the GDT[2].

gdtdesc:
  .word   0x17                            # sizeof(gdt) - 1
  .long   gdt                             # address gdt

In protected mode, selector values are interpreted as a index into the GDT. So if the GDT wasn't loaded or defined correctly, the processor will raises an exception (triple fault).

[1]: LGDT is used to load the base address and the limit of the GDT. Basically, it turns the GDT on.
[2]: GDT (Global Descriptor Table) works as a lookup table. It's used by the x86 processors which support protected mode.
It contains entries telling the CPU about memory segments. (Borrowed from http://wiki.osdev.org/)
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Att, Raphael S.Carvalho