Re: how does "hpcboot.exe" work?

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 6:52 AM DiTBho Down in The Bunny hole
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Thanks, I expected it to be a separate project, that is, outside the
> official sources.
> However there is no documentation, or rather the "sources" are the
> documentation.
>
> The README only explains how to use it, I'm trying to understand how
> it works internally.
>
> I am a bit shocked that "Windows-CE-v1" has no memory protection.
> It seems a bit like the same trick that was used with "bootX" on
> old-world PowerMacs (like e.g. wallstreet laptops), to load and start
> the linux kernel through macOS-v9.

I think the key to understanding it is looking at the
MemoryManager_LockPages code.
This code is used by the different loaders to lock pages into memory.
It's a bit twisty,
but the lock_pages function appears to come from WinCE itself. If you
thread it out,
we have lookup LockPages and UnlockPages in the coredll.dll library:

void *
Architecture::_load_func(const TCHAR * name)
{

        if (_dll == NULL)
                _dll = LoadLibrary(TEXT("coredll.dll"));

        if (_dll == NULL) {
                HWND owner = HpcMenuInterface::Instance()._root->_window;
                MessageBox(owner,
                    TEXT("Can't load coredll.dll."), TEXT("WARNING"),
                    MB_ICONWARNING | MB_OK);
                UpdateWindow(owner);

                return NULL;
        }

        return reinterpret_cast <void *>(GetProcAddress(_dll, name));
}

and then we use this function pointer in the MemoryManager_LockPages
class.

I've not puzzled out the next steps after "so you have it locked into
memory" but that
would be the next step.

There may be a talk that was recorded at AsiaBSDCon in the early 2000s
when all this
hacking was going on about it. Otherwise you'll have to puzzle through
the code. The
code itself is fairly well written, but working backwards from
MemoryManager_LockPages
to find it was a little tedious. However, it's also instructive. if
you're not otherwise comfortable
with C++, I'd suggest you start there. This is a very C++ program with
pretty good object
abstractions that you need to understand to puzzle things out
completely. But taking a moment
to puzzle will be rewarded. ${arch}/${arch}_boot.cpp is where to
start.  It also does a lot of different
guessing about different aspects of WinCE that you'll likely need to
know as well. You can tell
that lots of people did lots of tinkering to discover how to use the
WinCE interfaces to puzzle
out a lot of critical information about the machine at runtime, but
this was also augmented by
some use of tables to know things like frame buffer addresses and
geometry (apparently).

Also, to get it to boot directly to Linux or NetBSD, you're going to
have to replace the boot rom
cards. They live at the reset vector address for MIPS and without
changing those out, you'll
not be able to really boot directly (though it all depends on how
direct you need to be). I looked
into it briefly since the MoblePro and z50 both had replaceable cards
for this. But the cards
were populated by actual mask-programmed ROMs, not flash of any type,
at least according
to the chip codes I looked up... The ROM chips are well documented (or
were ages ago when
I was looking), just not their contents. I was looking for good
suspend / resume support and wound
up down that rabbit hole to these parts.

Good luck!

Warner

P.S. It also looks like hpcmips used sys/arch/hpcmips/stand/pbsdboot
which may be simpler
and easier to understand. I noticed this after I puzzled through hpcboot.

> On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 2:39 PM Martin Husemann <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 02:00:05PM +0200, DiTBho Down in The Bunny hole wrote:
> > > I can't find the source code and documentation for "hpcboot.exe".
> >
> > The source is in src/sys/arch/hpc/stand/hpcboot, there are some notes
> > about it in src/sys/arch/hpc/stand/README.
> >
> > Martin