[Skiboot] Skiboot on qemu questions

[Oliver O'Halloran]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 7:36 PM Marty E. Plummer
<hanetzer-skiboot at use.startmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 10:59:37PM -0500, Marty E. Plummer wrote:
> > 'you in this case' means the firmware (coreboot) I'm running?
> > I don't recall explicitly enabling MMU but this is all very early work,
> > so perhaps I did.
> >
> > So 0xe40 illegal instructions, got it. Should have RTFM'd a bit more but
> > I'm pretty excited about current progress and glazed over a bit.
> Inspection of the hsrr0 and hsrr1 registers at the time of exception
> leads me to believe an all zero instruction is attempting to be
> executed.

> I *think* this may be to do with abi elfv2 toc stuff, since
> the coreboot flow is basically bootblock calls romstage calls ramstage,
> which is mostly 'read from boot media to some kind of memory, and jump
> to it', so its basically executing three elf binaries in a row.

Is the romstage actually loading an ELF? Parsing the headers, etc is a
bit more complex than just loading a blob into RAM and jumping into
it. For skiboot we turn the .elf into a blob at compile time and the
blob (skiboot.lid) handles initialising the stack, the TOC, and
re-locating itself. If the romstage is parsing the ELF headers I'd
double check that the ELF entrypoint is being calculated correctly
since I've seen that being screwed up by kexec before.

> I assume each one should have its own toc & toc pointer set up prior to
> their equivalent of `int main()`, or at the very least close to it?

Yep, each loaded image should have its own TOC pointer. I wouldn't
assume that the compiler inserts anything to initialise the TOC for
you at boot since we have a bit of ASM in skiboot (and Linux) to
handle that. The boot time ABIs are generally pretty ad-hoc so
wouldn't expect anything resembling ABI compliance even if there's a
full ELF loader in coreboot.