[coreboot] Time for a new project

[Patrick Georgi]

Am Samstag, den 12.04.2008, 15:36 +0200 schrieb Philip Schulz:
>  For the unexperienced like me: Why would anybody need either LAR or
> SELF? I kind of understand the reasoning behind LAR, but why would
> SELF be neccessary? Can't you just extract a regular ELF file from a
> LAR archive and then load it?
Xou have to be prepared for the possibility that the most interesting
header comes last (after all the data). If that ELF image is compressed,
that means that you'll get to decompress everything (to somewhere), then
read that header, then copy everything around once more (and deal with
overlapping regions between your uncompressed copy and the final ELF
layout).

Right now, the ELF parser simply requires that this header is at the
beginning of the file, and fails otherwise - not nice, but "sane".

SELF promises proper handling of that, with a parser that is smaller,
more simple and more obviously correct than the current ELF parser.

> What do you mean by "streamload code" and why would you want to get
> rid of the ELF loader?
Streamloading code means the capability of reading the image (ELF, SELF,
whatever) byte-by-byte, and being able to make sense of that without
needing knowledge from information that comes later in the file.

ELF allows for flexibility we don't need, and that we don't want to cope
with.


Regards,
Patrick Georgi