Mike Nordell wrote:
I can't see why there should be any disagreement
about this. The only
logical piece of code to relocate it, is the same piece of code that loads
it. Having the kernel relocate itself, while it is running from/in the very
image that is to be relocated (!) is not only a bit tricky
(
http://svn.reactos.com/viewcvs/trunk/msvc6/ntoskrnl/ke_i386_multiboot.c?rev
=8046), it's also quite fragile. Should some, any, little piece be changed
like code injected or moved to prohibit short function call addressing, it
will crash. Should anyone ever make a change in the belief they could access
global data (like one usually can from a program), it will crash. Should the
very critical link-order change, making the multiboot table i the binary
move to outside the first 8192 bytes if the on-disk image, it will crash.
We can easily make sure that both _main as well as _NtProcessStartup are
at the beginning of the file via the linker. This will guarantee we
always have short function call addressing. In the new xml build system
we can easily mark the files that need to be at the beginning and
document *why*.
It will only be a VERY short space of code where global data is
inaccessible, and I would make sure that Alex or I document the code
sufficiently to illustrate to anybody who cares to look that they can't
access global variables there.
Documentation is always the key. Since I've taken the time to study and
understand what multiboot.S is actually doing, I can also blog an
article about how ntoskrnl begins life ( in addition to the inline
documentation ).
A PE binary normally knows nothing, and shouldn't
(have to) know anything,
about its on-disk binary stored format. It already has an entry in the PE
header telling what/where the entrypoint of the program is. Multiboot on the
other hand uses absolute physical addresses, including the entrypoint
address (that doesn't even need to point to within the image itself) that it
reads from the multiboot-header in the binary. There is no portable way for
a PE binary to know at what physical offset from the start of the binary
on-disk image a particular piece of code will be without knowing _exactly_
how the linker will place stuff in the on-disk image at compile-time.
Linker. Compile-time. Let it sink in a bit.
The offsets used at compile time are fixed-up by the linker at link
time. I don't see the problem.
Having this hard-coded relationship between multiboot
and ntoskrnl.exe makes
porting harder and the kernel code harder to understand (and therefore
maintain).
This "complexity" is primarily isolated to multiboot.S, except for the
self-reloc code that will be called from the beginning of _main(). At
least that's the plan. We have two choices here:
1) Do it the way you are suggesting, which is the "clean" way, and
presumably the "MS" way, and remain forever indebted to a multiboot
compatible proxy loader. This, IMHO, doesn't make anything simpler, it
just shuffles the complexity around.
2) Do it in a way that's multiboot compatible, so that we can be loaded
by any boot loader people should choose to use. I'd personally much
rather choose to be more compatible with FOSS boot loaders at this stage
of the OS than with the MS way of doing things. This will make it very
easy for dual-booters to use us, which is going to be more important
sooner than later. I don't see it having any particularly significant
effect on porting complexity. If we were to port ntoskrnl to another
archiecture, we'd likely look at how other OS's handle getting
multibooted on those architectures. We just duplicate that for that
architecture, then call _main() and let it reloc itself in-memory.
3. Have the boot-loader know whether or not /3G is
present. This allows _it_
to set up the architecture-specific initial page-table mappings. The benefit
of this is, as I see it, that the boot loader is by necessity a very
architecture specific piece of code, why it might as well follow what ntldr
does. The kernel image would then, when it gets control, already be at the
virtual address it's supposed to be, and it can freely access global data as
it should have been able to do in the first place. This also has the obvious
benefit that much of the _highly_ architecture-specific code can be removed
from the kernel itself.
That last point should really be the only argument that's needed.
Except that the code is already isolated in the architecture-specific
i386 directory. For that reason, I personally don't find it to be a very
compelling argument.
All this being said, it was just a curiosity... hacking multiboot.S to
support 2G and 3G dynamically only took a couple hours. Fixing ntoskrnl
to reloc itself should also be an easy job. It's no skin off my back if
people would rather remain forever tied to freeldr. I don't plan to be a
dual-booter, and don't imagine after this is said and done that I will
ever need to look at this section of code again. It's just that if we're
going to discuss changes, we should strongly consider compatibility with
the variety of bootloaders that our fellow geeks choose to use.
There's also the "social" reason why we should do it the way I've
proposed:
1) the people most likely to complain about having to go through freeldr
are people setting up dual-booting. This complaint *will* become a FAQ
item, as it will forever come up as an issue.
2) the people most likely to complain about not having the cleaner
design of freeldr are the ppl porting to a new architecture. Once it
works, they won't complain any more.
There are far fewer new architectures to port ReactOS to than there are
ppl who will one day be interested in actually running ReactOS. If we're
going to choose a design, we should choose the one that causes the least
complaints and "support issues" out of our up-and-coming fan-base.
--
Royce Mitchell III