[coyotos-dev] Looking for ideas - image loading

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 11:12 -0500, Jeroen C. Visser wrote:
> For ARM I faced the same problem. I ended up concatenating the kernel
> and the ipl.img. Working out the kernel ELF image size allows me to
> look for the "coyimage" header following it. Not very elegant, but it
> beats trying to work with bootloaders.

I was looking for a solution that would work with ELF boot loaders and
also with most of the cross-development loaders. Since almost all of
them know how to load ELF these days (and if needed, ELF can be
converted to SREC), I decided to add an ELF segment.

In case it may suggest a useful approach for your future work, you may
want to have a look at the script. The critical bits are:

  1. Change in the kernel Makefile to produce coyotos.reloc.o, which
     produces a fully resolved but not yet relocated kernel.

  2. coymerge, which bundles the mkimage file into a .o, combines it
     with coyotos.reloc.o, and executes the final, relocating link step
     to produce the executable.


shap