On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 05:05:29AM +0200, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
OTOH, the disadvantages of a new format are many. You'll have to write new tools for dealing with them. Those tools will have bugs.
Hopefully not so many if the new format is simple. In theory. :p
The format *itself* will have bugs/shortcomings for quite a while, too.
Well, it will stabilize eventually.
If coreboot supports loading certain ELF files, it will be surprising to (some) users if it does not support loading all ELF files.
This can be dealt with in the coreboot build system easily enough: just make sure to run the post-processor on all payload files.
Unfortunately that isn't the only way payloads come to coreboot.
lar will eventually be used to replace only the payload in a flash chip.
lar can already be used to do so in a .rom file.
The ELF loader in coreboot can easily detect this, too (it can check for a coreboot name segment, for example).
Yes.
I actually don't care what internal representation we use for complex binaries in LARs, as long as the lar utility can deal with common ELF files, and maybe a few other binary formats too!
I don't want a separate preprocessor. We are reinventing mkelfImage.
//Peter