Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 00:13:34 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: mjacob@feral.com Cc: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>, alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Loader badly broken on the alpha Message-ID: <39C6311E.19B7337B@newsguy.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0009171808040.96606-100000@beppo.feral.com>
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Matthew Jacob wrote: > > We need to pull out 3408 bytes- but it's not that simple- bcopy seems to take > 2544 bytes, which is ridiculously large for a boot block- so I replaced it > with a dopey one line C function but that didn't change _end for me, so I have > to look at the linker magic some I guess. Well, here is my position on this. No, we need not pull out 3408 bytes. While the loader must not bloat, the whole point of having boot[12] _and_ loader is allowing us to add extra features and intelligence to loader without having to worry about how many bytes a function is taking. boot[12] _must_ be capable of providing a decent environment for loader. That's it's main function, nowadays, no matter what bde wants or says. For the short term, one area of investigation that might provide us a quick respite is compressing softwords.c on FICL. This file contains a huge string of Forth commands that is interpreted when FICL is initialized. Since we do have gz uncompression on libstand, it should probably be easy to change the build process as to make that string a compressed version of what it is right now (softwords.c is generated by softwords.awk -- there's also a softwords.pl, if whoever does it is more comfortable with perl), and then uncompress it before interpreting it during FICL initialization. Alas, I'm not doing it, I'm not even looking into it. I have absolutely _no_ time to do it. Sorry. -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org capo@the.secret.bsdconspiracy.net "I demand that my picture show a handsome face, even if it doesn't look like me." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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