Greetings,
I'm in some final testing for the first cut of the baremetal toolkit for LinuxBIOS, and have come to a decision point.
In one of my applications, I need to write to the IDE drive from firmware. It was easy enough to add that to the polling driver in LinuxBIOS. The toolkit uses the same source as LinuxBIOS itself whenever possible.
The question: Is it desirable to have write capability in LinuxBIOS. Since being able to write introduces new danger, should it be turned on only by setting an option?
As for the toolkit itself, it is about ready to commit. It is a self contained small directory tree with it's own makefile. Any preferences on where it goes in the LinuxBIOS tree? util/baremetal?
G'day, sjames
On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, steven james wrote:
Is it desirable to have write capability in LinuxBIOS. Since being able to write introduces new danger, should it be turned on only by setting an option?
I worry a bit about write capability in that lowest-level stuff. Obviously for the case of Linux in flash the write capability is there, but putting it any lower should require an option.
As for the toolkit itself, it is about ready to commit. It is a self contained small directory tree with it's own makefile. Any preferences on where it goes in the LinuxBIOS tree? util/baremetal?
Hmm. Does this work as a payload?
ron
On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, steven james wrote:
Is it desirable to have write capability in LinuxBIOS. Since being able to write introduces new danger, should it be turned on only by setting an option?
I worry a bit about write capability in that lowest-level stuff. Obviously for the case of Linux in flash the write capability is there, but putting it any lower should require an option.
Agreed and done!
As for the toolkit itself, it is about ready to commit. It is a self contained small directory tree with it's own makefile. Any preferences on where it goes in the LinuxBIOS tree? util/baremetal?
Hmm. Does this work as a payload?
Really,it is a toolkit for producing various payloads. The first was a simple boot chooser that presents the user with available ELF payloads in the rom and loads the one selected.
I am also using it to produce a pforth system as a payload in rom.
It consists of a library built from LinuxBIOS componants that supplys useful functions like printk, malloc (simple heap allocation) strcmp, ide access elfboot and the like. It has some code grabbed from etherboot to find the LinuxBIOS table for elfboot and memory allocation.
It uses it's own copy of the header files for now, so they could be generalized a bit without breaking the whole tree.
Finally, an example ld script and makefile to produce an elf image ready for flashing.
ron
G'day, sjames
steven, that sounds like an amazingly useful toolkit that could go in util, as you said.
thanks
ron
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Ronald G. Minnich -
steven james