[coreboot] SELF/ELF/LAR

[Jordan Crouse]

On 16/04/08 18:16 +0200, Patrick Georgi wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 16.04.2008, 10:02 -0600 schrieb Myles Watson:
> > I like the current ability to compress payload segments based on the
> > best
> > compression for that segment.  It seems like we lose that if we put ELF
> > files (or a simple alternative) into the LAR without parsing them.
> The only reason for that so far was a replacement for the BSS section,
> which exists in ELF.
> 
> How about teaching LAR to have chunks, like:
>   LAR header (file is 40000 bytes compressed, 160000 uncomp., 3 chunks)
>   chunk header 1 (200 bytes, compression type 1)
>    data (eg. ELF headers)
>   chunk header 2 (39000 bytes, compression type 2)
>    more data (most sections in ELF)
>   chunk header 3 (800 bytes, compression type 3)
>    some more data
> 
> chunk headers could be written only if there's more than one chunk,
> making this backward compatible.
> 
> It would be the duty of lar (the tool) to make sense of an ELF file to
> define a sensible chunk layout for it.
> 
> With our hypothetical manifest file for LAR file handling, that could
> even be saved (and created by third party tools, for other formats), but
> the important property of this is that extracting and readding the file
> doesn't kill important data (eg. load and entry points), while there's
> still a 1:1 relation between payload and files in lar, but more
> flexibility.

Is this that much different then SELF?

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.