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Re: GSoC Proposal

Marvin Häuser <mhaeuser@...>
 

CC Nate (GSoC admin)
CC Steven (task mentor)
CC edk2-devel (you picked the logically correct list, but it’s pretty dead and barely anyone reads it)

Hey Ada,

Out of mere curiosity, why did you pick this item? :)

Hey Steven,

I feel like there is more to your proposal than is given on the task page. Why is it “ELF first”, is it something useful for UefiPayloadPkg or Linux somehow?

As for supporting it in the EDK II core, I personally feel like this is much too late. The entire ecosystem is centred around protocols (and the services tables) already. “Loading only when necessary” doesn’t sound very important to me personally, as the firmware image is already supposed to be fairly minimal. I’d rather like to see the introduction of “lazy protocols” (which do not require any new fundamental concepts), e.g., for network and HID stuff like mice and touch, which go through the driver connection procedure only when a protocol function is called for the first time. A big issue with this of course are non-function pointers in the protocol structure.

This will not only require a dynamic linker in the firmware to maybe double the size of the already disgusting and vastly unmaintained PE loader, it will also require further format conversion from ELF and Mach-O, both of which already are buggy (the former much more so than the latter). This is a tremendous effort in my opinion and introducing partial support will cause more awkward toolchain limitations.

Can you please outline why this (in my opinion, big) tradeoff is worth it? Just curious. :)

Best regards,
Marvin

On 13. Apr 2022, at 03:05, Ada Christine <adachristine18@...> wrote:
Hello, edk2 developers!

I've registered as a contributor candidate for GSoC 2022 and am interested in working on one of the items from the Tasks list here https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Tasks. Specifically, adding dynamic linking support caught my attention as this is something i've been investigating and learning more about in one of my own personal projects. As a little background, my personal project is an experiment in OS development and I use a very small subset of the boot services to get started and loaded. It can be found here: https://github.com/adachristine/sophia. Recently I've started investigating (and begun to implement) using ELF's dynamic facilities to dynamically load kernel modules. I know PE is slightly different to ELF, but the principles seem similar enough.

I've had a few glances at the EDKII source code in the past and have a general idea of how it all fits together. What I have in mind to implement this would be the following:
- create a dynamic linker as a module package to be compiled into the main application
(alternatively, implement dynamic linking as a runtime service driver?)
- adjust the build system to enable building as DLLs and dynamic linking of module packages to the main application
(module packages could be per-application and optionally site packages in a subdirectory of the ESP?)

I know the details of how this would all fit together are a little more involved, but this is just the rough first idea that came to my mind. Happy to hear feedback, and if my idea seems feasible I can get to work on a more in-depth plan to put this together.

Thanks!

- Ada
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