Could you help me understand the bootflow while using Qemu to load bins ? If we consider a simple program like writing ascii to VGA memory, where is bin loaded to when we call
qemu-system-i386 -drive 'file=my_image.bin,format=raw' -serial mon:stdio -smp 2
As per my understanding, the bios on finding a valid boot sector having the magic pattern 0xAA55, loads this sector to 0x7c00. Does Qemu actually copy the bin into this boot-sector of HDA?
I have seen in many tutorials that a linker script configured with 0x7c00 as the load address is used for generating the elf. However this elf is converted to a bin and passed to qemu. So, is the load address of 0x7c00 really needed ? Can it be any other value in the linker script ?