Hi,
I haven't seen the numbers on the dreaded size overhead. So that argument does not yet convince me. If I can fit a whole IP/UDP stack a network driver, and printk in 16K I have trouble seeing the problem.
multiply that by, let's just say 4, for 4 elf payloads for 4 functions. At that point, I can no longer fit a kernel + linuxbios in 1 MB flash. At present I can barely fit one linuxbios + 1 stripped kernel. I am right on the edge of being able to fit right now. Either I statically link in the VGABIOS code or I can't fit it. That's the issue for me. Yes, I am well aware that we hope to have more compact ROMCC code, but that is not there right now.
Maybe we can separate LinuxBIOS into 2 parts. The first part contains the core of LinuxBIOS, and the second part contains different extensions for different archs and elf loader at the end. We could have something like the following in the config which is pretty much like Ron suggested before
extension1 extension2 extension3 elfloader ide usb net
-Andrew