New subject: Help required to boot DUET (Seabios floppy mechanism)

23 Oct 2013


      Anthony Ross wrote:
]Thanks for the heartiest reply. Well I have gone through the pros & cons of DUET & haven' t faced any hurdles thus ]successfully
building it. Similarly getting to the EDK2 project I have successfully built OVMF 32 & 64 with secure boot ]configuration,
integrating them with seabios as csm and initializing them in QEMU-kvm. I have also successfully built & ]booted  the Coreboot Pkg
IA32 encapsulating it in the coreboot.rom and booting it under QEMU-kvm except for the X64 ]architectures I faced certain toolchain
errors.
]
]So if the Coreboot Pkg can boot so should DUET. I know there are both different but any how they both follow the same ]basis of the
UEFI platform. I say this because the Coreboot Pkg (coreboot.rom) during its boot up shows signs of errors & ]debugging messages are
worth noting but DUET (coreboot.rom) seems just absent.It also does not indicate any low ]memory problems in real mode, frankly
speaking the coreboot.rom just boots as if it was built with just a seabios ]payload. Yes one thing can be noted when I had earlier
booted DUET directly under QEMU it indicated something as ]'executing code out of memory' and it aborted there.Secondly taking again
into concern the Coreboot Pkg it follows lzma ]compression and also DUET so any issue about that?  & what about QEMU does it require
any changes as for DUET
It is good to hear you are  you are building successfully. Here is an alternative
method of booting the EDK2 Duet project. It uses the publically available AMD
simnow in place of qemu. Simnow has the benefit of booting unmodified BIOS
and other code. It boots the same BIOS image that is used on the real hardware.
You can use simnow to ensure you have a working image. Then you can try it on
real hardware. Simnow can be downloaded from here:
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/cpu-development/simnow-simulator/
I tested using the simnow model for an old AMD reference board named Solo.
The limited virtual address space of the processor used in the Solo model
avoids a memory overwrite bug in the Duet code. The limited DRAM of the
Solo model avoids pointer truncation problems in the Duet code.
Here is how I tested:
1) get EDK2 SVN version 14796 from one of the public servers.
2) build the Duet project and use the output to make a bootable hard disk image.
3) boot the hard disk image using the simnow solo model.
The simulation will stop with a red screen register dump. This is due
to a Duet bug where initialization of the 8254 timer while it is already
running causes a spurious interrupt. Use the built-in debugger to
continue out of the exception handler's hang loop. The simulation
will continue and boot the UEFI shell. If you exit the shell, the UEFI
menu system will run.
Here it the bootable hard disk image and a Windows batch file
for starting simnow. Some screen shots are also included.
http://notabs.org/edk2-duet/
Once you have this much working, you could try real hardware or
a different simnow model. This will expose some problems that 
need to be fixed in order to run on systems with larger memory
and on processors with larger virtual address space.
I have no experience with making SeaBIOS boot an embedded floppy
image. I may be able to give this a try, but I would have to first overcome 
Windows build problems that have crept into both SeaBIOS and coreboot.
Thanks,
Scott
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:00 AM, Scott Duplichan spambucket@notabs.org wrote:
Neo wrote:
]Hello
]
]  There has been no response to my thread [Help required to initialize
]coreboot as Seabios (floppy mechanism for DUET) payload] since a long
]time.I have eagerly waited but no solutions have turned up.
]  If Im mistaken in any way or the other please let know.
]
]Regards....
]
]Neo.
Hello,
If this is really something you want I may be able to help. Be aware that
Duet
is not an active EDK2 project. Duet has many problems that you must solve
before it is usable. The Duet concept is sound, and is a good match for
coreboot.
But it is not in general a usable project as it exists in the public EDK2
archive.
Building Duet should be easy, relative to other EDK2 projects. Can you
successfully
build other EDK2 projects? From EFI's beginning in 1999 to recently, the
only
supported build toolset was Microsoft. Recently gnu build tool support was
added.
But because Duet is not an active project, it may not build easily with gnu
tools.
In addition, EDK2 does not properly support any Windows port of the gnu
tools.
So try building with Microsoft tools for a reference point. But be aware
that EDK2
actually uses a hard-coded absolute path to the Microsoft tools. So unless
your
Microsoft build tools are installed in the same location as theirs, you will
have to
modify Basetools\Conf\ tools_def.template.
Once Duet builds, there are some basic bugs to fix. There is a memory
overlap
problem for example. Duet cannot work with more than 4GB of RAM if I
remember correctly. These are all easy to fix. Another problem is a
limitation
on the DXE image size. This limitation is due to the DOS 640 KB memory
limit.
The DOS 640 KB limit is relevant because the image is read from disk in
16-bit
mode and low memory is the most convenient place to put it.  This limitation
must be removed before a full featured DXE can be used.
Once all the problems are fixed, the reliance on legacy BIOS INT 13h can
be removed. The image can be kept in flash and then copied to DRAM
instead of reading it from a file.
One of the bigger problems is that UEFI needs a large amount of NVRAM.
The size is too big to fit into CMOS. That means you need to add code to
write this data to flash memory. Normally a 64-KB block of the BIOS flash
chip is set aside for this use.
There are several more problems in addition to these. They can all be
overcome, but it takes some time. The good thing about Duet is that it
uses only the generic portion of UEFI, so it is easy to run on an emulator
such as simnow or qemu for development and debug.
Duet requires that DRAM init and any other chipset initialization be
complete.
Duet finds DRAM by calling E820, though passing the info directly is
possible.
Duet does not supply ACPI tables. It finds existing ACPI tables and uses
those.
Same for SMBIOS.
Thanks,
Scott

Re: [coreboot] Help required to boot DUET (Seabios floppy mechanism)