Merge/Cleanup status

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Sun Oct 31 11:43:01 CET 2004


"Yinghai Lu" <yhlu at tyan.com> writes:

> 1. Using ROMCC to do propresser will help the size reduction?

Not directly.  But it does cleanup the header files and increase
the exposure to romcc.  There are a small handful of things
this make more maintainable.

> 2. what is usage for MOVNTI? It is for GDB....

Look at ramtest.c.  movnti is a non-teporal move (bypasses the cache).
In some cases it can noticeably increase store performance.  Last
I measured in the cases it mattered it increased store performance
by 3X.

> 3. How to use GDB to debug LinuxBIOS? Is it only for linuxbios_ram?
Correct.  Either an exception must be taken or a call to gdb_stub_breakpoint()
needs to be made.  At that point LinuxBIOS will stop and wait for
the debugger.  Assuming CONFIG_GDB_STUB is compiled in.  For details
on the gdb side, read up on the gdb remote serial protocol.

I'm not really a fan, I am still more productive with printf
debugging.  But implement ion exception handling support is a general
win.  And the support was easy to add.

> 4. You will use llshell for crt0.s or auto.c debug?

That is the idea.  Again I added it because it is available.  It would
not be hard to call out to it with an appropriate asm directive. 
If people find llshell useful.  

> 5. Current romcc only take constant parameters for non inline function? It
> that right?

There is something weird going on that affects the generated code, so
things don't work as smoothly as they should.

That said in theory function can be non-inline.

> 6. Anyone has tried to compile LinuxBIOS under Suse 9.1?  what's the
> recommended platform for LinuxBIOS compliation? It seems Suse 9.1 can not
> compile Etherboot properly. I am always using RH9 to do the work. And just
> found I can not compile LB for S2885, (size>65536), but I can do it in Suse
> 9.1 pro.

The goal is to have LinuxBIOS compiling as many places as possible.
As for recommendations we can call out specific revisions of the
tool chain that are known good but I won't call out distros.  

Size wise I know gcc-3.4 is about 2% better than gcc-3.3.

Interesting.  On the purely size issue you can bump ROM_IMAGE_SIZE a
little and see if it the build works.

As for etherboot I don't know what your compile failure is.  So I
don't know how to diagnose that.

Eric



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