Supporting extension ROMs and beyond...

[Eric W. Biederman]

Andrew Ip <aip at cwlinux.com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> > > I haven't seen the numbers on the dreaded size overhead.  So
> > > that argument does not yet convince me.  If I can fit a whole IP/UDP
> > > stack a network driver, and printk in 16K I have trouble seeing
> > > the problem.
> > multiply that by, let's just say 4, for 4 elf payloads for 4 functions. 
> > At that point, I can no longer fit a kernel + linuxbios in 1 MB flash. At 
> > present I can barely fit one linuxbios + 1 stripped kernel.
> > I am right on the edge of being able to fit right now. Either I statically 
> > link in the VGABIOS code or I can't fit it. That's the issue for me.
> > Yes, I am well aware that we hope to have more compact ROMCC code, but 
> > that is not there right now.
> Maybe we can separate LinuxBIOS into 2 parts.  The first part contains
> the core of LinuxBIOS, and the second part contains different extensions
> for different archs and elf loader at the end.  We could have something
> like the following in the config which is pretty much like Ron suggested

We already have LinuxBIOS separated into 2 parts, and the ELF loader is
the glue between them.   What we don't have is a good second part to hold
the Video code, and other random hacks.  Except for possibly Steve James
bare metal toolkit.

Eric