Hi everyone,
Having spent a lot of time learning about how OpenBIOS is organised this weekend, it seems quite obvious that the ELF, Linux, a.out and Fcode loaders currently duplicated for each architecture really should live in libopenbios.
A quick diff of the loader code in each of the arch/* directories shows that there are only trivial differences between each version, and so it would make a lot of sense to have just one copy of the loader code and then use headers and/or callbacks to make the loader code work across all architectures.
This also ties in with some of the work I've been doing for SPARC64 in that in order to implement the "go" word, we need to reorganise the boot word and hence implement the "program state" concept from the OF documentation. If all of the loaders are in one place then this shouldn't be too complicated a fix.
Can anyone think of a reason why we wouldn't want to move the loaders into libopenbios? And also, how I would I be able to get hold of the various types of file (ELF, Linux, a.out) for each platform in order verify that I hadn't made a mistake in the merge?
ATB,
Mark.