[geeks] Standalone Exectuable Formats

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> http://www.openfirmware.org/1275/mejohnson/

Ooh, neat!

> I recommend checking out the IEEE 1275 Homepage for the openboot
> documentation, and the SUN specific bindings:
>
> http://playground.sun.com/1275/home.html

I've torn through most of that stuff, I somehow missed the bindings,
though, which may be exactly what I need.  Essentially, I know some of
the things OFW exports, but I don't know how to get at them or what sort
of calling convention OFW expects.  That probably -is- covered in the
draft of the SPARC32 bindings.

> I know a guy who did a lot of embedded PowerPC design, and he used systems
> w. OpenBoot. I assume some of their practices for bootstraping code may
> be similar to what you are requesting, mainly loading a program on
> power-on, right? W/o an OS to speak of. Am I understanding you correctly?

Right, I'm trying to load a program without an OS.  It'll need to do
nothing more than terminal output at first.  Input would be nice, but
there's no need for that right off.

> Basically you have some sort of program and you just wanna load it and
> execute it, no need for an OS or multiuser crap, right?

Yep.  I'd kind of like to interact through ufsboot so that I don't have
to dedicate a slice to the code, but if ufsboot gets in the way of OFW,
that's fine--I can use a raw floppy or disk slice or the network.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke )
Elgin, TX        (  "Ma'am, I can do anything.  I own a game store."
USA               )             --Gord ( http://www.actsofgord.com )