[OpenBIOS] Program state and elf/linux/a.out/Fcode loaders
Mark Cave-Ayland
mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk
Sun Mar 14 22:50:01 CET 2010
Hi everyone,
Having spent a lot of time learning about how OpenBIOS is organised this
weekend, it seems quite obvious that the ELF, Linux, a.out and Fcode
loaders currently duplicated for each architecture really should live in
libopenbios.
A quick diff of the loader code in each of the arch/* directories shows
that there are only trivial differences between each version, and so it
would make a lot of sense to have just one copy of the loader code and
then use headers and/or callbacks to make the loader code work across
all architectures.
This also ties in with some of the work I've been doing for SPARC64 in
that in order to implement the "go" word, we need to reorganise the boot
word and hence implement the "program state" concept from the OF
documentation. If all of the loaders are in one place then this
shouldn't be too complicated a fix.
Can anyone think of a reason why we wouldn't want to move the loaders
into libopenbios? And also, how I would I be able to get hold of the
various types of file (ELF, Linux, a.out) for each platform in order
verify that I hadn't made a mistake in the merge?
ATB,
Mark.
--
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
t: +44 870 608 0063
Sirius Labs: http://www.siriusit.co.uk/labs
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