February 7, 2008

Everything is virtual

Well, almost :)

The very first goal towards the SAM440 port of AROS is halfway done. The UBoot Second Level Bootloader is able to use TFTP protocol and load AROS menu.lst configuration file and binaries. It loads the AROS executables and relocates properly. It has reached the stage where I can live it as it is for a while and concentrate on the real goal - making AROS work on SAM440 board!

I have decided to separate the kernel (and libraries loaded together with it) from user space. The kernel is loaded somewhere within first 16MB of RAM and then relocated to the virtual address at the very top of the 32-bit address space. The bootstrap loader works in the same way as the x86_64 bootstrap did. It puts all read-only sections upwards from the kernel base, and all writable sections downwards from the kernel base. Since I'm evil by definition, my core of SAM440 AROS will greedily take all the memory *below* it's physical location for itself. This memory (few megabytes) will be used as a local pool for kernel and will be excluded from usermode access of any kind.

I must admit I was a bit surprised and shocked as I read the AMCC440 documentation. The PowerPC E-Book from IBM stands quite clearly:
Book E provides binary compatibility for 32-bit PowerPC application programs.
Binary compatibility is not necessarily provided for privileged PowerPC instruc-
tions.

And you know what? They really mean that! Writing lowlevel code for AMCC440 cpu is very different from my previous experience with G3 CPU. :)

No screenshot today. Even worse, my bootlogs are very boring this days. Have a look if you're strong enough...

Filename 'boot/aros-amcc440'.
Load address: 0xe15a078
Loading: ######
done
Bytes transferred = 27062 (69b6 hex)
[BOOT] Loading ELF file from address 0e15a078
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 00800000 (Virtual addr: ff800000)
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 00802000 (Virtual addr: ff802000)
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 007feffc (Virtual addr: ff7feffc)
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 007feff0 (Virtual addr: ff7feff0)
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 007fef90 (Virtual addr: ff7fef90)
[BOOT] ELF: section loaded at 007f5f94 (Virtual addr: ff7f5f94)
[BOOT] Flushing all caches
[BOOT] Jumping into kernel
[BOOT] Bss: ff7fef90-ff7fefeb, 0000005c
[BOOT] Bss: ff7f5f94-ff7fef8b, 00008ff8
[KRN] Clearing BSS
[KRN]   0xff7fef90-0xff7fefeb
[KRN]   0xff7f5f94-0xff7fef8b
[KRN] Kernel resource pre-exec init
[KRN] MSR=00029000


Stay tuned for more news.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

keep on making dream come true! Thanx for your efforts:)

8:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellent progress! Keep up the great work.

1:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Each time, it's a pleasure to read status about new steps.

About PPC code, user mode is always compatible but at the supervisor level, some registers differ and more, the MMU model can be different.

9:30 AM  

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