I've run into what looks like an issue with how romcc handles bitfields and chars vs how the structure in static.c is created. When I'm accessing a member of a structure that comes after a bitfield or a single char between dwords or pointers, the code is grabbing data from a different address than the actual location of the data. I've found that if I add extra "reserved" bits to the bitfield to fill it up to a dword, and extra chars to do the same, everything works as expected.
I'm currently running into this trying to access data from the 'device' structure from static.c in romstage. If I don't add any changes, I'm getting a null pointer returned because I'm trying to access my data 6 bytes too early: mov esi,DWORD PTR [eax+0x86]
Here's what the structure currently looks like:
unsigned int enabled : 1; /* set if we should enable the device */ unsigned int initialized : 1; /* set if we have initialized the device */ unsigned int on_mainboard : 1; struct pci_irq_info pci_irq_info[4]; u8 command; ... ROMSTAGE_CONST void *chip_info;
Here's how I need to fix it to access chip_info correctly: unsigned int enabled : 1; /* set if we should enable the device */ unsigned int initialized : 1; /* set if we have initialized the device */ unsigned int on_mainboard : 1; unsigned int reserved : 29; struct pci_irq_info pci_irq_info[4]; u8 command; u8 res_1; u8 res_2; u8 res_3; .. ROMSTAGE_CONST void *chip_info;
This gives me the correct disassembly: mov esi,DWORD PTR [eax+0x8c] and I pick up the pointer to chip_info correctly. Note that with these changes, the structure in memory doesn't change at all.
TLDR: Structure is getting set up as dword aligned, but accessed by romcc as if it were packed.
Martin