Getting haiku_loader to play nicely with elves

Blog post by nmentley on Sat, 2010-06-19 15:04

One of the first steps I’m taking in setting up x86_64 support for haiku is updating haiku_loader to support elf64 binaries. I felt like it would be a bit more logical to be able to boot a 64bit kernel before trying to build one.

There are a few hurdles to jump before haiku_loader is ready to load a 64bit haiku kernel. For example, we need to add the code to detect weather a kernel is an elf32 or elf64 binary. We need to load it accordingly and finally we’ll need to modify how the kernel_args data structure is handled to support 64bit pointers.

GSoC: x86_64 Port

Blog post by nmentley on Wed, 2010-04-28 03:51

Currently Haiku is stuck in the 32bit world. This is fine for the initial BeOS R5 compatible release, but this is extremely limiting for future releases. It's a reasonable goal for Haiku to have a mature 64bit x86 port by the time the R2 release comes out. However ports don't become mature overnight. If full time work is put into porting haiku to the x86_64 platform this summer it'll be feasible to finish the port in a reasonable time to have it throughly tested and ready for the R2 release.

My project for the GSoC is to start the Haiku x86_64 port by completely porting the kernel and modifying the bootloader to load a x86_64 haiku kernel.