From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:45250) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1S23AJ-0006Sp-UB for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:11:13 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1S23AD-0007JH-Vq for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:11:07 -0500 Received: from thoth.sbs.de ([192.35.17.2]:22011) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1S23AD-0007Ix-Ln for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:11:01 -0500 Message-ID: <4F4BAB10.5020409@siemens.com> Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:10:56 +0100 From: Jan Kiszka MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <20120227095156.GA24607@redhat.com> <4F4BA055.9010005@siemens.com> <20120227160054.31694.qmail@stuge.se> In-Reply-To: <20120227160054.31694.qmail@stuge.se> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [SeaBIOS] Boot failure with MS-Dos 6.22 (due to bad BIOS build?) List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: peter@stuge.se Cc: seabios , "qemu-devel@nongnu.org" On 2012-02-27 17:00, Peter Stuge wrote: > Jan Kiszka wrote: >>> Then I noticed, that if I rebuild the BIOS, from the exact same revision >>> 1.6.3.1 revision that is committed in 'seabios' submodule in QEMU, then >>> it works fine. So AFAICT, it is not the Seabios source code at fault, >>> but rather the binary build we have commited to GIT. Should/can we rebuild >>> the bios.bin in GIT ? >> >> Probably not without understanding what causes this strange >> inconsistency. If Seabios builds without errors and then later on fails, >> this is also a bug. >> >> Kevin, what information do you need to assess my tool chain? > > In the coreboot project we have more than 10 years of experience from > distribution toolchains consistently being too broken to build a > working coreboot image. The same problems apply to SeaBIOS. > > As you know, distribution toolchains are heavily patched, presumably > to add some value to the distribution. The patches work fine when the > toolchains should output userland binaries or the odd kernel. They > fail frequently and in countless ways when used to produce bare metal > binaries. > > Within coreboot it is much less effort to build an i386-elf cross > toolchain than to mess with the hundreds if not thousands of issues > in the distribution toolchains. The same applies to SeaBIOS of > course. The script we use in coreboot is here: > > http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=tree;f=util/crossgcc > > If you want to investigate and spend time on motivating distributions > to unbreak their toolchains that's awesome, but be prepared to spend > many weeks disassembling binaries and reverse engineering the toolchain. Well, the Linux kernel can also be built with practically any distro out there. Having a need for a separate toolchain for building x86 on x86 is a bit overkill IMHO, at least for someone hacking on Seabios only infrequently like /me. Jan PS: Please avoid "mail-followup-to" in your replies, it messes up To/CC. -- Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT T DE IT 1 Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux