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FCBM: beginning of display output
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Mon, 03 May 2021 04:43:06 +0000
parents a62e5bf88434
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State of blobs in FreeCalypso firmware
======================================

FC Tourmaline is almost completely deblobbed.  Only the following very small
components exist in the form of blobs (prebuilt binary objects for which we
have no exact corresponding source) in the standard Tourmaline build:

* OSL and OSX glue components of GPF: 14992 bytes of code
* TMS470 compiler's RTS library (libc/libgcc equivalent): 13152 bytes of code

For OSL and OSX we do have reconstructed C code written based on disassembly of
the blobs, but I (Mother Mychaela) do not consider the current state of this C
reconstruction to be fit for production use - hence standard Tourmaline fw
builds use blob versions of these components.  However, our configuration and
build system gives you the freedom to select which version of each component
you would rather use; the selection is made with Bourne shell config variables
on the configure.sh invokation line:

OSL=0	use the blob version of OSL
OSL=1	use the reconstructed C version of OSL
OSX=0	use the blob version of OSX
OSX=1	use the reconstructed C version of OSX

The current default is OSL=0 and OSX=0.

RTS library
===========

We do have source code for some versions of the TMS470 compiler's RTS library,
but they may not be exactly corresponding to the blob version from TCS211 which
we are using.  This area is deemed to be such a low priority that no real
investigation has been done yet.