Re: [Etherboot-developers] Porting report

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

Yannis Mitsos <gm...@te...> writes:

> Hi Eric,
> 
> >currticks() appears not to be working.
> >
> Ok I found the problem, I have commented out in the await_reply function a check
> 
> that is performed to see if the ESC is pressed and I have substituted with
> something else ...:-(
> Now it is ok ...
> 
> Before finishing the porting in the 5.0.8 version I have left 2 more open
> issues.
> 
> 1) I did not manage to implement the  dosum in assembly. But I have seen from
> the 5.1.x that is implemented in C so there is no need to move-on with this.

Right.  We don't need extreme speed an obvious version in C is fine.
  
> 2) Currently the COFF loader loads only the .text and .data sections. I should
> make this a little bit more generic since the COFF file may include up to 2^16
> different sections. Currently, the COFF loader is similar to the a.out but is
> should be like the ELF loader.
> 
> The help I need from you know is to clarify the usage of the "meminfo" structure
> 
> and how it is initialized. Is this related to the PC architecture ? Do we need
> this in an embedded system ?

Yes and no.

It comes out of the PC architecture but the concept is a sound one.

The portable concept is a set of ranges where you have memory.
On PC there are typically only two ranges and occasionally more.

On an embedded system if you only have one range of memory that is fine.

Etherboot uses those ranges of memory to verify you actually can load
the executable you are trying to load.

> My first feeling is that I can load the structure with some static values
> without the need to execute functions such as basememsize(), meme820() which I
> do not know what they are supposed to return :-(

Correct.  Though actually detecting how much memory you have would be polite.
 
Eric