compiling a working Seabios

[Greg Ungerer]

Hi All,

I have an Intel/Truxton (Tolapai/EP80579) type platform that I am
using coreboot and seabios on. Up to now I have been using a
pre-compiled binary from Kevin's download site:

http://linuxtogo.org/~kevin/SeaBIOS/seabios-0.5.1.tar.gz

and that has been working fine. (The coreboot is modified to
support some changes on this particular hardware platform).

Now the problem is that I want to generate seabios binaries from
source. And I can't seem to be able to compile a working one.

My host build system is a Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 install (using the most
up to date packages). This a gcc-4.4.1 and binutils-2.20 setup.

If I get the source seabios-0.5.1 package from Kevin's download
page and compile that I end up with a bios.bin.elf that is:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 gerg gerg  1048716  2010-02-17 15:11 bios.bin.elf

Hmm, rather large :-)  The actual contents maybe ok:

out/bios.bin.elf:     file format elf32-i386

Sections:
Idx Name          Size      VMA       LMA       File off  Algn
   0 .text         00013000  000ed000  000ed000  000ed000  2**4
                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, CODE

The file offset is looking bad here.

If I instead use a binutils-2.18 "ld" that I have lying around
(doing "make LD=i386-linux-ld") then I end up with a more
reasonable sized bios.bin.elf of 82060 bytes. But this bios.bin.elf
just hangs after being loaded by coreboot on my target.

I tried compiling this same seabios version (0.5.1) on an older
Fedora Core 9 system (also an x86_64 install), and again that produced
a non-working bios.bin.elf.

I also got the latest seabios git tree and tried that. I also couldn't
get a working seabios binary using that either.

What versions of gcc/binutils do others use?
Does anyone have any ideas where by building could be going wrong?

Regards
Greg

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Ungerer  --  Principal Engineer        EMAIL:     [e-mail]
SnapGear Group, McAfee                      PHONE:       [phone]
8 Gardner Close                             FAX:         [phone]
Milton, QLD, 4064, Australia                WEB: http://www.SnapGear.com

[Peter Stuge]

Greg Ungerer wrote:
> My host build system is a Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 install (using the
> most up to date packages). This a gcc-4.4.1 and binutils-2.20
> setup.

coreboot has no end of problems with all distribution toolchains. It
is recommended to use a vanilla toolchain with known-good component
versions for building coreboot whenever coreboot is acting up - I
think it might be a good idea to do so for SeaBIOS as well.

You could use the script coreboot/util/crossgcc/buildgcc to create
a toolchain.

Kevin, is there a problem with using a non-linux toolchain, ie. one
for i386-elf?

//Peter

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 03:30:36PM +1000, Greg Ungerer wrote:
> My host build system is a Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 install (using the most
> up to date packages). This a gcc-4.4.1 and binutils-2.20 setup.
>
> If I get the source seabios-0.5.1 package from Kevin's download
> page and compile that I end up with a bios.bin.elf that is:
>
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 gerg gerg  1048716  2010-02-17 15:11 bios.bin.elf

This looks like a binutils quirk that others have run into - a work
around was recently added to SeaBIOS git (after the 0.5.1 release).
> If I instead use a binutils-2.18 "ld" that I have lying around
> (doing "make LD=i386-linux-ld") then I end up with a more
> reasonable sized bios.bin.elf of 82060 bytes. But this bios.bin.elf
> just hangs after being loaded by coreboot on my target.

That's odd.  Did you follow the instructions at:

http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS#SeaBIOS

In particular, make sure the proper changes are made to the
src/config.h file.

-Kevin

[Greg Ungerer]

Hi Kevin,

Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 03:30:36PM +1000, Greg Ungerer wrote:
> > My host build system is a Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 install (using the most
> > up to date packages). This a gcc-4.4.1 and binutils-2.20 setup.
> >
> > If I get the source seabios-0.5.1 package from Kevin's download
> > page and compile that I end up with a bios.bin.elf that is:
> >
> > -rwxr-xr-x 1 gerg gerg  1048716  2010-02-17 15:11 bios.bin.elf
>
> This looks like a binutils quirk that others have run into - a work
> around was recently added to SeaBIOS git (after the 0.5.1 release).

Just using an older ld was enough to fix. So it does look to
be a binutils problem.

I tried the current git head, it still has the same problem
though.
> > If I instead use a binutils-2.18 "ld" that I have lying around
> > (doing "make LD=i386-linux-ld") then I end up with a more
> > reasonable sized bios.bin.elf of 82060 bytes. But this bios.bin.elf
> > just hangs after being loaded by coreboot on my target.
>
> That's odd.  Did you follow the instructions at:
>
> http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS#SeaBIOS
>
> In particular, make sure the proper changes are made to the
> src/config.h file.

Ahh, thats what I was missing. From the README I thought it
was enough to just "make" :-)

I can now generate working seabios.

Thanks
Greg

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Ungerer  --  Principal Engineer        EMAIL:     [e-mail]
SnapGear Group, McAfee                      PHONE:       [phone]
8 Gardner Close                             FAX:         [phone]
Milton, QLD, 4064, Australia                WEB: http://www.SnapGear.com