RE: [ECOS] Run Time Loader (without RedBoot)

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@ix.netcom.com>]

> From: Guilly A
>
> Actually, the Bios part will always be running, and the
> application will be
> running on top of that.
> I can manage to have the bios copying the Application from the
> Flash to the
> RAM, at a fixed and previously known RAM address. But this limit my
> architecture to be splitted forever with a bios RAM zone and an
> application
> RAM zone, that can not have theire size/location changed in the future.
> This is what I want to avoid, as the bios tends to get bigger and bigger,
> and overlap the application zone wich seems to be oversized (for now) for
> the application.
> But my question was, more precisely, does a kind of run time loader exist
> under eCos, or does eCos provides facilities to handle
> position-independent
> code? It becomes clearer that it does not. I have to think about another
> solution.

Some work has been done on this, but not finished. There's some stuff in
services/loader, but it's incomplete. eCos really wasn't designed with this
capability in mind. It has no run-time symbol table for resolving references
in the loaded app, so one would have to implement that or rig up a sofware
interrupt interface and thunk functions in the application. Also, one would
have to figure out how to get GDB to adapt to the actual load location, if
you wanted to debug your application.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com


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