low level shell
Eric W. Biederman
ebiederman at lnxi.com
Wed Oct 27 23:51:01 CEST 2004
"Bryan E. Chafy" <bchafy at ccs.neu.edu> writes:
> Apologies if this is a redundant contribution.
>
> None of my pc motherboards have JTAG or HW debug capabilites.
> And constantly (hot)flashing, changing ram init code, then (hot)flashing again
> gets old really fast.
:)
romcc helps by reducing typos. But this addresses the problem
of understanding what is wrong :)
The other trick that helps is to hard code the memory configuration
and put that in the fallback image. And then use a second copy of linuxbios
to develop new code. At least that way you don't need to swap the rom chip.
> Looking around, I couldnt find any debug tools that would operate at
> basically the reset vector level. I thought this was the goal of openbios,
> but I got lost in all the jibberish about 4th and firmware standards.
I think the people who described it as such could not get that low level :)
Forth certainly needs memory to work.
> So I set out to make a small interactive low level shell with the goal
> of providing at least some tools to aid in board/memory bringup and debugging.
> This was nontrivial given the system limitations, however I got a few
> things to work.
It looks nice. And inspires some more ideas.
> Attached is llshell.inc (for linuxbios1, Ive not tried any of the new
> stuff yet) and llshell_linux (for running/testing inside of linux).
> It's written entirely in asm and can run in a memoryless early stage
> (say at the beginning of ram_set_registers or points afterword).
Now if only we can figure out a way to successfully trap exceptions
without memory working....
Eric
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