[LinuxBIOS] State of the buildrom

[Jordan Crouse]

On 30/11/07 16:29 -0500, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> There's some other stuff that would be nice:
> 
> - aborting the build nicely when the generated image is too large
> - support for different rom chip sizes (in kconfig)
> - do something about the patching of LinuxBIOS Config files
> 
> We talked about some of this before on IRC; I seem to recall Jordan's feeling
> was that the last 2 points would be easier under v3. Should we focus our
> efforts there for these improvements?

There just isn't any good way to change v2 config files without lots of
pain - especially for specifying values on the fly (like rom chip sizes).
We currently get away with simple things like payloads and enabling lzma
by patching the code, but that is only one Config.lb change away from not
applying.  Also, the patches scale exponentially.  A patch for lzma,
a patch for the lab payload, a patch for the lab payload with lzma, and
so forth.

So other then patching, our only real option for v2 would be to develop
configuration files on the fly with scripts, which is every bit as evil
as it sounds.

Not that we really have a great story for v3 either, but we have the
opportunity to change that.  I think that at a minimum, we will need 
the ability to override configuration opens with environment variables -
ROM size and compression control come to mind as good candidates, but
really a generic way to override config without editing text files would
be the most ideal.

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.