Even More Bare Metal ARM

I’ve spend much of the weekend (it is a holiday, right?) playing around with my bare metal prototype. In the last post in my Bare Metal ARM series, I did a little context switching. Actually it implemented simple co-routines that could give up execution to each other. In this installment, I’ve added a rudimentary ready list and implemented a simple message passing scheme allowing threads to communicate with each other and block if no messages are available.

The full source of my little prototype is here. A little explanation of how I’m developing this might be in order. init.S is the processor initialization and exception handling code, written in assembly because most of it has to be. init.S calls into the C standard library by calling __libc_start_main() after setting up a few stack pointers and zeroing out the uninitialized data (.bss) area. __libc_start_main() ends up calling main() after initializing the library.

The Makefile can be used to build and run the code.

[~/ellcc/baremetal/arm] dev% make
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -march=armv7 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp  -c init.S
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -march=armv7 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp -g -MD -MP -Werror -Wall -Wno-unused-function -c main.c
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -march=armv7 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp -g -MD -MP -Werror -Wall -Wno-unused-function -c simple_console.c
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -march=armv7 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp -g -MD -MP -Werror -Wall -Wno-unused-function -c simple_memman.c
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -march=armv7 -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp -g -MD -MP -Werror -Wall -Wno-unused-function -c scheduler.c
../../bin/ecc -target arm-ellcc-linux-eabi5 -nostartfiles -T kernel.ld \
    ../../libecc/lib/arm/linux/crtbegin.o \
    init.o main.o simple_console.o simple_memman.o scheduler.o \
    ../../libecc/lib/arm/linux/crtend.o \
    -o kernel.elf -Wl,--build-id=none
../../bin/ecc-objcopy -O binary kernel.elf kernel.bin
[~/ellcc/baremetal/arm] dev% make run
../../bin/qemu-system-arm -M vexpress-a9 -m 128M -nographic -kernel kernel.bin
audio: Could not init `oss' audio driver
kernel: hello world
unhandled system call (0) args: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
__syscall(0) = -1, No error information
hello from context 42 code = 3
hello from context 42 code = 6809
prompt: hi there
got: hi there
prompt: 

To exit out of QEMU use the key sequence Control-A x.

By the way, the send and receiving of messages (the “hello from context” messages) is done in main.c:

...
Queue queue = {};
static intptr_t context(intptr_t arg1, intptr_t arg2)
{
    for ( ;; ) {
      Message *msg = get_message(&queue);
      printf("hello from context %" PRIdPTR " code = %d\n", arg1, msg->code);
    }
    return 0;
}
...
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
...
    new_thread(context, 4096, 42, 0);
    Message msg = { { NULL, sizeof(msg) }, 3 };
    send_message(&queue, &msg);
    msg.code = 6809;
    send_message(&queue, &msg);
...

I do debugging by using two windows, one to start QEMU in debug mode and the other to run GDB. The first window:

[~/ellcc/baremetal/arm] dev% make debug
../../bin/qemu-system-arm -s -S -M vexpress-a9 -m 128M -nographic -kernel kernel.bin
audio: Could not init `oss' audio driver

The other window looks like:

[~/ellcc/baremetal/arm] dev% ~/ellcc/bin/ecc-gdb kernel.elf
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.7
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
.
For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from kernel.elf...done.
(gdb) target remote :1234
Remote debugging using :1234
0x60000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) break main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x10408: file main.c, line 40.
(gdb) c
Continuing.

Breakpoint 1, main (argc=1, argv=0x100e8 ) at main.c:40
40          printf("%s: hello world\n", argv[0]);
(gdb) 

One aspect of this code that might be confusing is that there is no apparent explicit initialization code in main() for the serial port, memory allocator, or scheduler. Since this is implemented with a full C library, I take advantage of the fact that static constructors work and are extensions to C in both clang and GCC. An example is at the bottom of the scheduler.c file:

/* Initialize the scheduler.
 */
static void init(void)
    __attribute__((__constructor__, __used__));
    
static void init(void)
{   
    // Set up the main and idle threads.
    idle_thread.saved_sp = (Context *)&idle_stack[IDLE_STACK];
    __new_context(&idle_thread.saved_sp, idle, Mode_SYS, NULL,
                  0, 0);
    
    // The main thread is what's running right now.
    main_thread.next = &idle_thread;
    ready = &main_thread;
        
    // Set up a simple set_tid_address system call.
    __set_syscall(SYS_set_tid_address, sys_set_tid_address);
}

Why did I do it this way? Because I don’t have to change any source code if I want to swap out simple_console.c for a hypothetical interrupt_console.c, for example. I just have to change the SRCS macro in the Makefile.

The next step is to implement interrupt handlers, the timer, and preemptive scheduling. By the way, the full POSIX pthread_create() is still a ways off, but it feels like it is getting closer all the time.

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