low level shell

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Wed Oct 27 23:51:01 CEST 2004


"Bryan E. Chafy" <bchafy at ccs.neu.edu> writes:

> Apologies if this is a redundant contribution.
> 
> None of my pc motherboards have JTAG or HW debug capabilites.
> And constantly (hot)flashing, changing ram init code, then (hot)flashing again 
> gets old really fast.

:)

romcc helps by reducing typos. But this addresses the problem
of understanding what is wrong :)

The other trick that helps is to hard code the memory configuration
and put that in the fallback image.  And then use a second copy of linuxbios
to develop new code.  At least that way you don't need to swap the rom chip.

> Looking around, I couldnt find any debug tools that would operate at
> basically the reset vector level.  I thought this was the goal of openbios,
> but I got lost in all the jibberish about 4th and firmware standards.

I think the people who described it as such could not get that low level :)
Forth certainly needs memory to work.

> So I set out to make a small interactive low level shell with the goal
> of providing at least some tools to aid in board/memory bringup and debugging.
> This was nontrivial given the system limitations, however I got a few
> things to work.

It looks nice.  And inspires some more ideas.
 
> Attached is llshell.inc (for linuxbios1, Ive not tried any of the new
> stuff yet) and llshell_linux (for running/testing inside of linux).
> It's written entirely in asm and can run in a memoryless early stage
> (say at the beginning of ram_set_registers or points afterword).

Now if only we can figure out a way to successfully trap exceptions
without memory working....

Eric



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