Re: [Etherboot-developers] Porting question

[<ebi...@ln...>]

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:

> >>Etherboot needs to be stripped down?
> >>
> >It was a wrong phrase of mine. I mean that I am trying to comment-out 
> >everything related to x86.
> 
> Still the wrong idea. You shouldn't need to do that. Eric has done a
> brilliant job separating out the non-architecture specific components
> from the architecture specific ones. 

Thank you.  Although I keep finding things in misc.c that really should
be moved.  But don't matter at the moment as they are covered in 
#ifdef PCBIOS
#endif

> Ideally you should only need to
> create a new branch in arch and new config files at the top level.  If
> not tell us what needs to be fixed.
> 
> >>I would recommend writing a mkelf for your platform that packages
> >>kernels ramdisks and everything together, instead of adding a COFF
> >>handler.  But it is your port...
> >>
> >This is not very clear to me. Initially I will try to add the COFF 
> >loader and if it is not possible I will come-back again.
> 
> Whatever loader format you choose, it has to have some kind of directory
> at the beginning to indicate where the pieces go in memory. 

Ken COFF actually has this.  The downside is simply that COFF is
about as standard as a.out.  There are lots of minor variations.

> Etherboot supports NBI and ELF. 

But everything but ELF is currently limited to x86. The ELF loader
is arch independent.  It just requires to I think two defines from
an arch dependent header file.

> Instead of writing COFF support, try to see if you
> can write an ELF generator, then you don't need to implement it in
> Etherboot since it already has an ELF loader. You may need to write a
> custom one anyway because of the need to load ramdisks.
> 

Eric