Status report

[Eric McCorkle]

I have been offline for the past week, because I have been traveling in
response to a family illness, and because of an accident which rendered
my laptop non-functional until yesterday.  Thus, I am still more or less
where I was last week.

As things stand now, I am trying to track down points of failure in the
existing boot code.  At this point, I am able to use the EFI
OutputString function for a limited form of printf-style debugging.  I
have already found one cause of failure: a bug in machine/_types.h,
which causes (u)int64_t to be incorrectly defined as a 32-bit integer
when compiling with -m32 on a 64-bit machine.  This caused EFI functions
to fail.  At this point, I am still seeing the main loader.efi crash,
and _reloc seems to be failing in simpler test programs that I compile.
 My efforts in the near future will focus primarily on diagnosing these
issues.

In general, the difficulties of getting the existing code to work seem
to be greater than I anticipated.  Given that nobody has worked on this
code in a while, and the difficulties that accompany boot loaders, this
isn't surprising, but it has made progress slow-going.

I have, however, gotten the EDK II build tools from Intel to compile on
FreeBSD, as well as the microsoft IASL compiler, and I will likely
create ports for both of them after the end of coding.

My goal for this week is to hunt down the causes of all the errors I'm
seeing.

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