2014-03-27 22:26 GMT+08:00 Patrick Georgi <patrick(a)georgi-clan.de>de>:
The plan is to enable us to write romstage code with
the expectation that at
least some RAM (through CAR) is available. (while bootblock is expected to
work without RAM of any kind, and ramstage has the full RAM available)
If someone wants to use romcc for romstage, that means working without other
object files (since romcc never emits a "call" instruction, except when
hand-assembled). Thus reusing other .c files in romcc means "#include *.c"
as it always did.
Proposal: If someone goes that route, and things break due to the .c files
of the coreboot core being too complex for romcc to handle, they get to keep
the pieces - it's unsupported.
I expect special cases like Vortex (or old chipsets like Via C3, if someone
has the interest and time to do the port) to have a simple enough RAM
initialization that they can be implemented as standalone C code. That's
still _much_ more comfortable than writing assembly, and it'll work: it has
one entry-point (like CAR code), one exit point (calling into common C code
to load the next stage), and everything inbetween is compiled by romcc to
work without RAM.
Should we find out that all the hundred ancient ram inits we get contributed
reimplement the same things over and over, we can still consider moving
those parts to src/lib/romcc, neatly separated from regular romstage code.
I agree your idea. It should be not difficult for Vortex86EX. :)
Andrew