On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, Myles Watson wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: coreboot-bounces+mylesgw=gmail.com@coreboot.org [mailto:coreboot- bounces+mylesgw=gmail.com@coreboot.org] On Behalf Of Peter Stuge Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 4:46 PM To: coreboot@coreboot.org Subject: Re: [coreboot] ELF
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 12:09:07AM +0200, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
So my base is *not* "ELF is best", but it is "ELF is just fine for this, so why would we need another format, with all infrastructure overhead that requires?". So please start by explaining what is bad, or even just sub-optimal, in using ELF here.
This is my take;
The problem in the past has been that ELFs have gone into flash (.rom) with structures that failed at run time in part because of the coreboot ELF loader and in part because of the somewhat constrained environment.
All files going into a .rom will go through lar, so I want lar to do any and all processing that is neccessary. It does not have to be internal code, it can be a library, or even an external helper, but my major concern is not needing to run any extra commands.
I expect to be able to put vmlinux straight into flash (.rom file) using lar. I specifically do not want a separate ELF chewer. That was mkelfImage. I don't hate mkelfImage in any way but I want to avoid that extra step in lar.
I also expect to be able to extract said vmlinux from one flash (.rom file), store it on disk (but not use it) and later write it into another flash (.rom file).
Do you need the intermediate storage step? Is there an advantage over copying from one .rom file to another?
Myles
If there's going to be a chooser, I can easily imagine end users may want to add or replace modules on a machine. They may know nothing of C, makefiles, or development at all, just click here to install.
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