I’ve been trying out various LLMs for working on assembly code in my toy OS kernel for a few months now. It’s mostly low-level device setup and bootstrap code, and I’ve found they’re pretty terrible at it generally. They’ll often generate code that won’t quite assemble, they’ll hallucinate details like hardware registers etc, and very often they’ll come up with inefficient code. The LLM attempt at an AP bootstrap (real-mode to long) was almost comical.
All that said, I’ve recently started a RISC-V port, and I’ve found that porting bits of low-level init code from x86 (NASM) to RISC-V (GAS) is actually quite good - I guess because it’s largely a simple translation job and it already has the logic to work from.
69
47