[Barrelfish-users] [Barrelfish] Hagfish kernel image structure and latest version

[David Cock]

Sebastian,

Hagfish is a custom loader for the Barrelfish CPU driver, which operates 
under a few unusual assumptions: Mainly, the CPU driver (kernel) itself 
is not self-relocating, but relies on the bootloader (Hagfish) to do the 
relocation for it.

It would definitely be possible to modify Hagfish to load an arbitrary 
ELF, however.  You'd have to make a few changes in the relocation code 
to not look for Barrelfish-specific segments and so on, but there's 
nothing particularly weird or non-standard about it.

Hagfish is pretty static, and doesn't change much from version to 
version.  We'll update the repository shortly (which we should have done 
together with the release).  Feel free to ask more specific questions if 
you decide to use it - we're happy to help.

David

On 27/1/21 5:41 pm, sebastian.scherbel at fau.de wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a CS student trying to port an research operating system from 
> x86_64 to ARMv8 and stumbled across Hagfish.
>
> Hagfish should basically be able to load any ELF with its sections 
> into memory with minor modifications? Or is there certain requirement 
> for the kernel image structure that I didn't notice whilereading your 
> publication [1] and skimming the source code?
>
> The last commit in the public repository is from March 2017. But in 
> the changelog of your last Barrelfish release from 2020 states "Update 
> Hagfish to latest version". Have there been any bigger changes or 
> improvements in the meantime?
>
> Regards Sebastian
>
> [0] 
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/barrelfish-users/2020-March/001597.html 
> <https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/barrelfish-users/2020-March/001597.html>
> [1] http://www.barrelfish.org/publications/TN-022-ARMv8.pdf 
> <http://www.barrelfish.org/publications/TN-022-ARMv8.pdf>
>
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