mbdump's home page
mbdump is a small utility to dump information in a multiboot or
multiboot2 header in a nice human readable format. 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 or kernel.
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.
This project is hosted at Savannah
(https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mbdump). The
git repository is at git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mbdump.git. The
program is somewhat experimental so take its output with a pinch
of salt.
The latest version is 1.1. You can download it
at https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/mbdump/mbdump-1.1.tar.gz.
To compile, just run a "make". Give the program an os image or
kernel as an argument and it will print the information it
finds. Note that kernel images are sometimes compressed; you have
to decompress them to let this program read them. Also note that
the Linux kernel is not Multiboot compliant.
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/multiboot/multiboot.html.
The maintainer and developer is Andrea Monaco. Send suggestions,
bug reports and patches to andrea dot monaco at autistici dot org.