[coreboot] cbfs XIP patch

[Myles Watson]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:28 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Myles Watson <mylesgw at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:06 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> But I think we have to have clean support for XIP in ROM, which means
>>> we have to have a way for cbfs to place a block of code in a
>>> designated place.
>> So can we force the compiler to make everything inside a block
>> relative so that it can be position-independent?
>
> I've tried in v3, but have been warned that the way we get PIE in v3 is really
> not legitimate, and not guaranteed to keep working. Some form of PIE
> that gnubin experts would accept
> would be very good to have.
Agreed.  I think it should be used very sparingly even if we have it.

> I don't think we'll ever escape the need for some way to force files
> into specific locations. The ROMSTRAP
> code from nvidia is not the first example, nor will it be the last.
>
>
>>> If we are certain we don't need XIP then we don't need this patch. But
>>> if we have XIP we can
>>> remove some fairly confusing __asm__ code in failover, as well as the
>>> attendant load scripts.
>> Does a normal image need to be XIP?
>
> It is now and always has been. I don't know how to make it otherwise.
OK.

>> I think this is the easy part.  The harder problems have to do with
>> what we want to allow to be constrained to a specific location.  The
>> fewer of those the better to me.
>
> I agree. The chipset vendors will always create challenges in this
> area, however. And we must still solve our own ROM code issues as
> well.
>
> One option is to do the FILO trick and make %cs point to the start of
> the ROM code that you are running. This is easy: have a GDT entry for
> fallback code and a GDT entry for normal code. Then it suffices to do
> load the %cs with the right segment index for fallback or normal.
> This approach would remove the need for XIP for our ROM segments.
How hard would that be?  I'd be happy to test on SimNOW and a Tyan board.

Thanks,
Myles