[coreboot] Geode LX/CS5536 VSA

Chris Kilgour techie at whiterocker.com
Fri Feb 8 17:21:29 CET 2008


Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>> Please be aware this is all completely untested; there could be plenty
>> of typos and plain-old mistakes inside.  The binaries produced should be
>> considered unstable and experimental.  Use them at your own risk!
>>   
>>     
>
> I will try to take a look ASAP. The optimal case would be that the
> original and modified sources compile to an identical binary or at least
> a binary with perfectly explainable differences.
>
>   
The VSA sources are a mix of assembly and C code.  The binaries will be
quite different because (naturally) gcc will produce different machine
code than Microsoft C from the 16-bit era, and all the assembly-coded
functions are now using GNU __attribute__((fastcall)) rather than "MS
pascal" calling convention.  Also, the final link output will have the
various bits and pieces in different locations.  So a straight binary
diff will exhibit mostly differences.

That said, I took the time of locating and disassembling the assembly
functions from OLPC VSA blob and comparing against the output of the
assembly functions from my build (by far the biggest risk because of all
the manual modifications I made), and the differences were all
explainable in light of the above.  For the C code I felt it was way too
hard to even attempt such an approach.

Within the tarball there is a file modification_notes.txt that
highlights what I have done.  I'm hoping to foster some discussion on a
testing approach that lays somewhere between manual inspection and
slapping the open-tools blob into a coreboot ROM and crossing our fingers...

Chris.




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