[SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS 16-bit compiler

[Jes Sorensen]

On 03/26/10 11:02, Michal Necasek wrote:
>
>   (sorry for top posting)

RFC1855

>   I suppose you don't envision SeaBIOS developers working on Windows then? I expect getting the right GCC bits going on Windows is a roughly comparable effort to getting Open Watcom working on Linux...

Well if you decide to port it to this Watcom compiler, I doubt Kevin
would object if you posted patches for it. The issue is more which is
the default compiler, and said patches should not be allowed to break
the build for the default compiler.

Given the base of SeaBIOS and it's ties to Coreboot and KVM, it's pretty
obvious that the primary developer base is working on Linux. Telling
these developers that they must do their work on Windows from now on
isn't realistic.

>   Re OW on Linux - the port is a 'beta' in the sense of targeting Linux. But it's possible to build (a subset of) Open Watcom on Linux using GCC and use it as a cross compiler. If it helped, I could probably prepare some kind of a package because I know which parts are needed.

My first question here is, is it free? If it's a proprietary commercial
product, it would be out of the question right there.

>   I'm not suggesting that OW should replace GCC as the tool to build SeaBIOS, just that it might be a viable alternative. I don't *know* if Open Watcom would generate significantly better code, I'm just assuming that at for the 16-bit parts it's very likely, and the 32-bit code is not likely to be significantly different, especially if code size is a concern.

Given that this is BIOS code, performance is really less of an issue
than if it was a core driver in your operating system. As long as the
compiler used generates code that fits within the space constraints and
most importantly, it is correctly generated, then IMHO performance is a
lesser issue, and we shouldn't forget that multiple compilers may
generate different errors in the code which may be more work to resolve.

Regards,
Jes