this will allow us to manage bloat in the loader by using a bytecoded HLL
rather than lots of C code. It also offers an opportunity for vendors
or others with special applications to significantly customise the boot
process without having to commit to a divergent code branch.
This early commit is to allow others to experiment with the most effective
mechanisms for integrating FICL with the loader as it currently stands.
Ficl is distributed with the following license conditions:
"Ficl is freeware. Use it in any way that you like, with the understanding
that the code is not supported."
All source files contain authorship attributions.
Obtained from: John Sadler (john_sadler@alum.mit.edu)
and will bypass transfers for more than 8k. Blocks are invalidated after
2 seconds, so removable media should not confuse the cache.
The 8k threshold is a compromise; all UFS transfers performed by
libstand are 8k or less, so large file reads thrash the cache.
However many filesystem metadata operations are also performed using
8k blocks, so using a lower threshold gives poor performance.
Those of you with an eye for cache algorithms are welcome to tell me
how badly this one sucks; you can start with the 'bcachestats' command
which will print the contents of the cache and access statistics.
* Embed the stack into the bss section for loader and netboot. This
is required for netboot since otherwise the stack would be inside our
heap.
* Install loader and netboot in /boot by default.
* Fix getbootfile so that it searches for a ',' instead of a ';'
when terminating the filename.
filesystems.
- New 'help' command and data in the help.* files (not yet installed),
provides topic and subtopic help, indexes, etc.
- Don't crash if the user tries to set an invalid console. Be helpful
instead.
- Expand tabs (badly) on the i386 video console.
- Some minor cosmetic changes.
- Use the ISA PnP enumerator.
- Use the new linker set code, throw out the gensetdefs stuff.
- Produce an intermediate loader image that has symbols stripped, to aid
- in debugging.
- Supply ISA port access functions required for ISA PnP
can fit into my test machine.
- Move to using STAILQs rather than ad-hoc singly-linked lists.
- Use a mostly procedural interface to the PnP information. This
improves data-hiding.
Implement a new linker-set technique (currently on i386 only but should work
on Alpha as well). This is a good candidate for replacing the current
gensetdefs cruft completely.
the boot.config settings are persistent, this seems to provide a
useful override capability, and should break only on broken
boot.config's.
Output a cosmetic newline if booting with no input.
Read boot.help before parsing boot.config. We were parsing
boot.config first, which could result in boot.help being read
from a different location (or not found), which would probably
just cause surprise, without being useful.
can seek back to the first PT_LOAD and doing a close/reopen if it cannot.
This is because the first PT_LOAD section includes the ELF headers.
This fixes gzipped kernels on the i386, it should solve mike's problem
for the Alpha.
independent elf loader and have access to kld modules. Jordan and I were
not sure how to create boot floppies, and the things we tried just made
SRM laugh in our faces - but it was upset at boot1 which was not touched
by these changes. Essentially this has been untested. :-(
What this does is to steal the last three slots from the nine spare longs
in the bootinfo_v1 struct to pass the module base pointer through.
The startup code now to set up and fills in the module and environment
structures, hopefully close enough to the i386 layout to be able to use
the same kernel code. We now pass though the updated end of the kernel
space used, rather than _end. (like the i386).
If this does not work, it needs to be beaten into shape pronto. Otherwise
it should be backed out before 3.0.
Pre-approved in principle by: dfr