Am 06.05.2009 02:14, schrieb Kevin O'Connor:
What are your plans with lzma decoding? (Will the bootblock have an lzma decoder for deploying coreboot_ram and will coreboot_ram have an lzma decoder for the payload?)
Yes. Tests with coreboot_ram showed that lzma compressing it gains more (vs. nrv2b compressing) than the overhead of shipping the lzma decoder, so this is a net win.
Unless you really want to put the remaining fallback/normal code into cbfs, in which case that work would be useless. I really like the idea of using %cs, if it's known to be stable.
SeaBIOS must deal with %cs modifications, so I'm familiar with using it. However, it's not clear to me what coreboot needs it for. Can someone point me to a discussion on the problems with PIE?
Short version: We can't rely on the compiler to do the right thing. We already run into problems every now and then because coreboot uses gcc (and binutils) in ways not intended by its developers - unix userland and linux kernel (and probably hurd) is what they seem to support.
Patrick