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iPXE
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Building an Etherboot image consists of three stages:
Though this is a remarkably complex process, it is important to note that it all happens automatically. Whatever state your build tree is in, you can always type, for example
and know that you will get a floppy disk image with an RTL8139 driver built from the current sources.
Each source file (a .c or a .S file) is compiled into a .o file in the bin/ directory. Etherboot makes minimal use of conditional compilation (see #ifdef considered harmful), and so you will find that all objects get built, even the objects that correspond to features that you are not intending to include in your image. For example, all network card drivers will be compiled even if you are just building a ROM for a 3c509 card. This is a deliberate design decision; please do not attempt to "fix" the build system to avoid doing this.
Source files are defined to be any .c or .S files found in a directory listed in the Makefile variable #SRCDIRS. You therefore do not need to edit the Makefile just because you have added a new source file (although you will need to edit the Makefile if you have added a new source directory). To see a list of all source directories and source files that the build system currently knows about, you can use the commands
Rules for compiling .c and .S files are defined in the Makefile variables #RULE_c and #RULE_S. Makefile rules are automatically generated for each source file using these rules. The generated rules can be found in the .d file corresponding to each source file; these are located in bin/deps/. For example, the rules generated for drivers/net/rtl8139.c can be found in bin/deps/drivers/net/rtl8139.c.d. These rules allow you to type, for example
and have rtl8139.o be built from drivers/net/rtl8139.c using the generic rule #RULE_c for compiling .c files.
You can see the full list of object files that will be built using
Once all objects have been compiled, they will be collected into a build library ("blib") in bin/blib.a.
The Makefile rules for a particular object can be customised to a certain extent by defining the Makefile variable CFLAGS_<object>. For example, if you were to set
then bin/rtl8139.o would be compiled with the additional flags -DFOO. To see the flags that will be used when compiling a particular object, you can use e.g.
If you need more flexibility than the CFLAGS_<object> mechanism provides, then you can exclude source files from the automatic rule generation process by listing them in the Makefile variable #NON_AUTO_SRCS. The command
will show you which files are currently part of the automatic rule generation process.
A single source file can be used to generate multiple object files. This is used, for example, to generate the decompressing and the non-decompressing prefixes from the same source files.
By default, a single object will be built from each source file. To override the list of objects for a source file, you can define the Makefile variable OBJS_<object>. For example, the arch/i386/prefix/dskprefix.S source file is built into two objects, bin/dskprefix.o and zdskprefix.o by defining the Makefile variable
Since there would be little point in building two identical objects, customised compilation flags (see Customising compilation) are defined as
Thus, arch/i386/prefix/dskprefix.S is built into dskprefix.o using the normal set of flags, and into zdskprefix.o using the normal set of flags plus -DCOMPRESS.
In addition to the basic rules #RULE_c and #RULE_S for compiling source files into object files, there are various other rules that can be useful for debugging.
You can see the results of preprocessing a .c file (including the per-object flags defined via CFLAGS_<object> if applicable) using e.g.
and examining the resulting file (bin/rtl8139.c in this case).
You can see the results of assembling a .c file, or of preprocessing a .S file, using e.g.
You can build targets with debug messages (DBG()) enabled using e.g.
You will probably not need to use these targets directly, since a mechanism exists to select debugging levels at build time; see Debugging-enabled builds.
Etherboot is designed to be small and extremely customisable. This is achieved by linking in only the features that are really wanted in any particular build.
There are two places from which the list of desired features is obtained:
The config.h file is used to define global build options that are likely to apply to all images that you build, such as the console types, supported download protocols etc. See the documentation for config.h for more details.
When you type a command such as
it is used to derive the following information:
You can see this process in action using the command
which will print
This should be interpreted as follows:
"Elements" is the list of components preceding the first dot in the target name. "Prefix" is the component following the first dot in the target name. (It's called a "prefix" because the code that makes it a .zrom (rather than a .dsk, .zpxe or any other type of target) usually ends up at the start of the resulting binary image.)
"Drivers" is the list of drivers corresponding to the "Elements". Most drivers support several network cards. The PCI_ROM() and ISA_ROM() macros are used in the driver source files to list the cards that a particular driver can support.
"ROM name" is the first element in the "Elements" list. It is used to select the PCI IDs for a PCI ROM.
"Media" is the "Prefix" minus the leading z, if any.
These are derived from the "ROM name" and the PCI_ROM() or ISA_ROM() macros in the driver source files.
This is the interesting part. At this point, we have established that we need the rtl8139 driver (i.e. rtl8139.o) and the decompressing PCI prefix (i.e. zpciprefix.o). Our build system (via the compiler.h header file) arranges that every object exports a symbol obj_<object>; this can be seen by e.g.
which will show the line
By instructing the linker that we need the symbols obj_rtl8139 and obj_zpciprefix, we can therefore ensure that these two objects are included in our build. (The linker will also include any objects that these two objects require, since that's the whole purpose of the linker.)
In a similar way, we always instruct the linker that we need the symbol obj_config, in order to include the object config.o. config.o is used to drag in the objects that were specified via config.h; see config.h.
These are the flags that we pass to the linker in order to include the objects that we want in our build, and to check that they really get included. (This latter check is needed to work around what seems to be a bug in ld).
The linker does its job of linking all the required objects together into a coherent build. The best way to see what is happening is to look at one of the resulting linker maps; try, for example
The linker map includes, amongst others:
It is worth spending time examining the linker map to see how an Etherboot image is assembled.
Whatever format is selected, the Etherboot image is built into an ELF file, simply because this is the default format used by ld.
The ELF file resulting from linking needs to be converted into the final binary image. Usually, this is just a case of running
to convert the ELF file into a raw binary image. Certain image formats require special additional treatment.
ROM images must be rounded up to a suitable ROM size (e.g. 16kB or 32kB), and certain header information such as checksums needs to be filled in. This is done by the makerom.pl program.
1.8.15