Re: [PATCH ARM v6 00/14] mini-os: initial ARM support

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com>]

On 17 July 2014 16:55, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-07-16 at 22:29 +0100, Julien Grall wrote:
>
>> > There are two assumptions the code makes that may need changing in the future, but
>> > which hopefully don't need to hold up this initial support:
>> >
>> > - The assumption that the kernel will be loaded at start of RAM + 0x8000.
>> >
>> > - The assumption that Xen will mark the GIC address range as device memory.
>> >    This should probably be fixed when the C code gains the ability to control
>> >    the translation tables, map 4K pages, etc.
>>
>> I'm fine with the assumptions for an initial support. Did you write-down
>> somewhere those restrictions? So if an issue happen in the future, we
>> will be able to find quickly the issue.
>
> Yeah. we can live with them for now, I think. It should be documented
> though.

I've noted the offset requirement in the linker script and the GIC
memory type assumption in a comment in gic.c.

> What sort of time line are you foreseeing for fixing them, in terms of
> before or after 4.5?

If the GIC will always occupy a distinct set of 1MB sections then
flagging those is easy enough. Otherwise, we'd have to add support for
the second-level page tables, which would complicate things a little.

Making the boot code work from arbitrary offsets looks very difficult.
I guess we'd need to compile libfdt as PIC, set up a temporary C stack
after the kernel (we can assume there's some RAM following it I
think), parse the FDT to find the base address, copy the kernel
forwards or backwards word by word (first copying the copying code to
a safe location somewhere).

It all seems very inefficient. From my point of view, it would seem
better to have some way to specify the desired load offset.

> We should probably consider sticking a "tech preview" or similar label
> on mini-os/ARM in 4.5 if these issues remain (the load address one in
> particular).


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://0install.net/
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