[coreboot] GSoC 2010

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Mon Mar 8 16:59:14 CET 2010


[Fullquote because it seems Stefan's mail mail did not end up on the
list by accident.]

On 06.03.2010 23:39, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> On 3/6/10 7:26 PM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>   
>>> Just having it as a FILO add-on would be the best solution. Then it can
>>> use all the FILO infrastructure (reading lots of filesystems, using a
>>> recovery with a nice menu on a USB stick, 
>>>     
>>>       
>> OTOH, it could simply be an ELF loaded by FILO. That allows upgrades of
>> flashrom as needed, and if FILO can load flash images from any media, it
>> should be able to do the same with executable code.
>>   
>>     
> Unless FILO gets a full blown linker, that ELF file would need a full
> blown VFS, IDE driver, FS drivers, USB stack, ....
>
> But yes, maybe doing run time linking at firmware time is what we want
> to do, after all...
>   

Assuming the addresses of symbols in FILO/libpayload are known at
compile/link (well, prelink) time of flashrom, it should be possible to
offer prelinked ELF files to FILO without needing any linker in FILO.
This would be similar to the linking of initram and stage2 in coreboot v3.
Or we make sure FILO is able to write out a symbol table over serial or
to disk. That symbol table can then be used by a linker on another
machine to link flashrom, and then a linked flashrom can be supplied to
FILO.
I could try to dig up my symbol-table-in-LAR patches for v3.

That's surely an interesting project regardless of how we implement it.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
"I do consider assignment statements and pointer variables to be among
computer science's most valuable treasures."
-- Donald E. Knuth





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