I want to write a BIOS debugger.Can you give me some advice?

[Eric W. Biederman]

Íõº£Ã÷ <whm_buaa at sina.com> writes:

> hi , all,
>       I am a postgraduate student of Beijing University of Aeronautics and
> Astronautics ( in china , Beijing).
> 
> 	 I want to write a BIOS debugger as my graduation article.
> 	 My plan are as follow:
>       1. firstly I want to write a debug stub which is INDEPENDENT of specific
> Mainchips,
> 
> 		and small enough. The stub can set up a basic environment ( such
> as RAM
> 
>         initialization, uart initialization). It can also communicate with the
> develop PC
> 
>         through Serial port,and excute the debug command transfered by the
> develp PC.

As has been previously mentioned
 
> 	 2. write a source debugger	.
>                                                      ---------
>                                                     |         |
>      --------------------------       serial port   | develop |
>      | BIOS       |debug stub | ----<---->--------- |   pc    |
> ¡¡¡¡ --------------------------                     -----------
>                                                        | |
>                                                 ------------------
> 
>                 the system figure
> 
>     I appreciate some advice about the possibility of my plan . 	

LinuxBIOS initializes the ram, and a few other hardware devices and that
is it.  So if you want to write a debugger for that there is some
interesting work to do.  If you want to write a debugger for firmware
services that are active after the initial hardware setup that is a
different problem.  Currently LinuxBIOS provides none of those.

Ram initialization is the single hard dest driver to write for LinuxBIOS.
Short of an ICE I don't think you are going to get a debugger in
there.  An emulator like bochs would could work, but it an emulator
may not reproduce the bugs that are visible in real life.  A debugger
is useful for is looking around and dumping the state at a given
point.  That we can do moderately well with modifing the source code.

What would be truly advantageous is a mini-C compiler that would
compile code that would exclusively use the registers, not memory, and
allow either inline assembly or builtin operations for all of a
processors special instructions.  The biggest debugging problem I have
seen is when you add debugging code a register is accidentally
stomped.  If it was possible to write the initial startup code in a
high level language it would be much easier to debug and maintain.

On the subject of firmware services, there are projects underway to
build a backwards compatiblity layer for LinuxBIOS.  If what you are
really after are debugging firmware services, I would recommend
playing with etherboot.  The larger target would be stubs that you can
stick in a moderately random static ELF executable.   But I am fairly
certain this is just what is done on embedded targets and is not
really new ground.

Eric