[OpenBIOS] Q: How to "squeeze" C functions in between two symbols?

[Blue Swirl]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber at web.de> wrote:
> Am 08.10.2010 um 19:22 schrieb Alexander Graf:
>
>> On 08.10.2010, at 19:11, Andreas Färber wrote:
>>
>>> Am 08.10.2010 um 15:30 schrieb Alexander Graf:
>>>
>>>> Why don't you just create a separate binary for RTAS which can then use
>>>> relative branching inside of itself? You could then copy the whole blob
>>>> somewhere and be sure that everything's there.
>>>
>>> How? :) Assuming I managed to fork arch/ppc/qemu/{start.S,ldscript} for a
>>> separate ELF binary, what would we do with it? Would QEMU need to load it
>>> separately as a ROM with known location, like openbios-ppc? Or would you
>>> embed such a binary into OpenBIOS somehow?
>>
>> You'd embed in into OpenBIOS. Just create a .c file keeping the blob as
>> variable from the .elf binary.
>
> Sorry to bug... I have a very simple rtas.S now, linked into an
> rtas-qemu.elf. What now?
>
> i) Is there an existing way to get my binary file into a .c file variable,
> or do I need to write my own generator in C? (or worse, Forth)

The dictionary blobs are transformed to C with hexdump.

> ii) To do anything with the blob I need to load it properly as an ELF image,
> and libopenbios/elf_load.c:elf_load() requires an ihandle. How would I get
> an ihandle from a variable in a .c file? It doesn't let me specify the
> (client-supplied) memory address either.

I'd not use ELF here but binary blobs, real ROMs don't have any ELF headers.

> iii) Once I've loaded the ELF image, how do I get the function's entry
> point? OpenBIOS itself just uses the CPU's reset vector and branches to
> _entry from there - anything I need to add/change in the ldscript?

You could assume that the first location is the starting point. This
can be arranged by the linker script (special section for the starting
point).