Building EFI Applications Using the GNU Toolchain

Building EFI Applications Using the GNU Toolchain

David Mosberger davidm@hpl.hp.com

23 September 1999

Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Hewlett-Packard Co.

Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Intel Co.

Last update (DD/MM/YYYY): 19/08/2024

Introduction

This document has two parts: the first part describes how to develop EFI applications for IA-64,x86 and x86_64 using the GNU toolchain and the EFI development environment contained in this directory. The second part describes some of the more subtle aspects of how this development environment works.

Part 1: Developing EFI Applications

Prerequisites:

To develop EFI applications, the following tools are needed:

• A C11 compiler: gcc, clang (Supported since 4.0) or MSVC (Supported since 4.0)

• A version of "objcopy" that supports EFI applications (if using a GNU based toolchain). To check if your version includes EFI support, issue the command: objcopy --help

  Verify that the line "supported targets" contains the string "efi-app-ia32" and "efi-app-x86_64" (for x86 and x64 respectively) and that the "-j" option accepts wildcards. The binutils release binutils-2.24 supports Intel64 EFI and accepts wildcard section names.

• For debugging purposes, it's useful to have a version of "objdump" that supports EFI applications as well. This allows inspect and disassemble EFI binaries. Alternatively, use dumpbin on Windows from Visual Studio Development Tools, by launching it through Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio.

Directory Structure

This EFI development environment contains the following subdirectories:

• inc: This directory contains the EFI-related include files. The files are taken from Intel's EFI source distribution, except that various fixes were applied to make it compile with the GNU toolchain.

• lib: This directory contains the source code for Intel's EFI library. Again, the files are taken from Intel's EFI source distribution, with changes to make them compile with the GNU toolchain.

• gnuefi: This directory contains the glue necessary to convert ELF64 binaries to EFI binaries. Various runtime code bits, such as a self-relocator are included as well. This code has been contributed by the Hewlett-Packard Company and is distributed under the GNU GPL.

• apps: This directory contains a few simple EFI test apps.

• licenses: This directory contains the supplementary license files applicable to this project

  The main license is found in LICENSE

• docs: This directory contains some additional notices about building with gnu-efi

Setup

It is necessary to edit the Makefile in the directory containing this README file before EFI applications can be built. Specifically, you should verify that macros CC, AS, LD, AR, RANLIB, and OBJCOPY point to the appropriate compiler, assembler, linker, ar, and ranlib binaries, respectively.

If you're working in a cross-development environment, be sure to set macro ARCH to the desired target architecture ("ia32" for x86, "x86_64" for x86_64 and "ia64" for IA-64). For convenience, this can also be done from the make command line (e.g., "make ARCH=ia64").

Building

To build the sample EFI applications provided in subdirectory "apps", simply invoke "make" in the toplevel directory (the directory containing this README file). This should build lib/libefi.a and gnuefi/libgnuefi.a first and then all the EFI applications such as a apps/t6.efi.

Running

Just copy the EFI application (e.g., apps/t6.efi) to the EFI filesystem, boot EFI, and then select "Invoke EFI application" to run the application you want to test. Alternatively, you can invoke the Intel-provided "nshell" application and then invoke your test binary via the command line interface that "nshell" provides.

Writing Your Own EFI Application

Suppose you have your own EFI application in a file called "apps/myefiapp.c". To get this application built by the GNU EFI build environment, simply add "myefiapp.efi" to macro TARGETS in apps/Makefile. Once this is done, invoke "make" in the top level directory. This should result in EFI application apps/myefiapp.efi, ready for execution.

The GNU EFI build environment allows to write EFI applications as described in Intel's EFI documentation, except for two differences:

• The EFI application's entry point is always called "efi_main". The declaration of this routine is:

  EFI_STATUS efi_main (EFI_HANDLE image, EFI_SYSTEM_TABLE *systab);

• UNICODE string literals must be written as W2U(L"Sample String") instead of just L"Sample String". The W2U() macro is defined in <efilib.h>. This header file also declares the function W2UCpy() which allows to convert a wide string into a UNICODE string and store the result in a programmer-supplied buffer.

• Calls to EFI services should be made via uefi_call_wrapper(). This ensures appropriate parameter passing for the architecture.

Part 2: Inner Workings

WARNING: This part contains all the gory detail of how the GNU EFI toolchain works. Normal users do not have to worry about such details. Reading this part incurs a definite risk of inducing severe headaches or other maladies.

The basic idea behind the GNU EFI build environment is to use the GNU toolchain to build a normal ELF binary that, at the end, is converted to an EFI binary. EFI binaries are really just PE32+ binaries. PE stands for "Portable Executable" and is the object file format Microsoft is using on its Windows platforms. PE is basically the COFF object file format with an MS-DOS2.0 compatible header slapped on in front of it. The "32" in PE32+ stands for 32 bits, meaning that PE32 is a 32-bit object file format. The plus in "PE32+" indicates that this format has been hacked to allow loading a 4GB binary anywhere in a 64-bit address space (unlike ELF64, however, this is not a full 64-bit object file format because the entire binary cannot span more than 4GB of address space). EFI binaries are plain PE32+ binaries except that the "subsystem id" differs from normal Windows binaries. There are two flavors of EFI binaries: "applications" and "drivers" and each has there own subsystem id and are identical otherwise. At present, the GNU EFI build environment supports the building of EFI applications only, though it would be trivial to generate drivers, as the only difference is the subsystem id. For more details on PE32+, see the Specification.

In theory, converting a suitable ELF64 binary to PE32+ is easy and could be accomplished with the "objcopy" utility by specifying option --target=efi-app-ia32 (x86) or --target=efi-app-ia64 (IA-64). But life never is that easy, so here some complicating factors:

1. COFF sections are very different from ELF sections.

   ELF binaries distinguish between program headers and sections. The program headers describe the memory segments that need to be loaded/initialized, whereas the sections describe what constitutes those segments. In COFF (and therefore PE32+) no such distinction is made. Thus, COFF sections need to be page aligned and have a size that is a multiple of the page size (4KB for EFI), whereas ELF allows sections at arbitrary addresses and with arbitrary sizes.

2. EFI binaries should be relocatable.

   Since EFI binaries are executed in physical mode, EFI cannot guarantee that a given binary can be loaded at its preferred address. EFI does try to load a binary at it's preferred address, but if it can't do so, it will load it at another address and then relocate the binary using the contents of the .reloc section.

3. On IA-64, the EFI entry point needs to point to a function descriptor, not to the code address of the entry point.

4. The EFI specification assumes that wide characters use UNICODE encoding.

   ANSI C does not specify the size or encoding that a wide character uses. These choices are "implementation defined". On most UNIX systems, the GNU toolchain uses a wchar_t that is 4 bytes in size. The encoding used for such characters is (mostly) UCS4.

In the following sections, we address how the GNU EFI build environment addresses each of these issues.

(1) Accommodating COFF Sections

In order to satisfy the COFF constraint of page-sized and page-aligned sections, the GNU EFI build environment uses the special linker script in gnuefi/elf_$(ARCH)_efi.lds where $(ARCH) is the target architecture ("ia32" for x86, "x86_64" for x86_64 and "ia64" for IA-64). This script is set up to create only eight COFF section, each page aligned and page sized.These eight sections are used to group together the much greater number of sections that are typically present in ELF object files. Specifically:

• .text

  Collects all sections containing executable code.

• .data

  Collects read-write data, literal string data, global offset tables, the uninitialized data segment (bss) and various other sections containing data.

  The reason the uninitialized data is placed in this section is that the EFI loader appears to be unable to handle sections that are allocated but not loaded from the binary.

• .rodata

  Collects read-only data to retain the correct memory permissions

  The reason read-only data is placed here instead of the in .text is to make it possible to disassemble the .text section without getting garbage due to read-only data. Besides, since EFI binaries execute in physical mode, differences in page protection do not matter.

• .dynamic, .rela, .rel, .reloc, .areloc

  These sections contains the dynamic information necessary to self-relocate the binary (see below).

Unnecessary sections:

• .hash (and/or .gnu.hash)

  Collects the ELF .hash info (this section must be the first section in order to build a shared object file; the section is not actually loaded or used at runtime).

  GNU binutils provides a mechanism to generate different hash info via --hash-style=<sysv|gnu|both> option. In this case output shared object will contain .hash section, .gnu.hash section or both. In order to generate correct output linker script preserves both types of hash sections.

• .dynsym, .symtab

  The symbol tables used for ELF debugging

A couple of more points worth noting about the linker script:

• On IA-64, the global pointer symbol (__gp) needs to be placed such that the entire EFI binary can be addressed using the signed 22-bit offset that the "addl" instruction affords. Specifically, this means that __gp should be placed at ImageBase + 0x200000. Strictly speaking, only a couple of symbols need to be addressable in this fashion, so with some care it should be possible to build binaries much larger than 4MB. To get a list of symbols that need to be addressable in this fashion, grep the assembly files in directory gnuefi for the string "@gprel".

• The link address (ImageBase) of the binary is (arbitrarily) set to zero. This could be set to something larger to increase the chance of EFI being able to load the binary without requiring relocation. However, a start address of 0 makes debugging a wee bit easier (great for those of us who can add, but not subtract... ;-).

• The relocation related sections (.dynamic, .rel, .rela, .reloc) cannot be placed inside .data because some tools in the GNU toolchain rely on the existence of these sections.

• Some sections in the ELF binary intentionally get dropped when building the EFI binary. Particularly noteworthy are the dynamic relocation sections for the .plabel and .reloc sections. It would be wrong to include these sections in the EFI binary because it would result in .reloc and .plabel being relocated twice (once by the EFI loader and once by the self-relocator; see below for a description of the latter). Specifically, only the sections mentioned with the -j option in the final "objcopy" command are retained in the EFI binary (see Make.rules).

(2) Building Relocatable Binaries

ELF binaries are normally linked for a fixed load address and are thus not relocatable. The only kind of ELF object that is relocatable are shared objects ("shared libraries"). However, even those objects are usually not completely position independent and therefore require runtime relocation by the dynamic loader. For example, IA-64 binaries normally require relocation of the global offset table.

The approach to building relocatable binaries in the GNU EFI build environment is to:

1. build an ELF shared object

2. link it together with a self-relocator that takes care of applying the dynamic relocations that may be present in the ELF shared object

3. convert the resulting image to an EFI binary

The self-relocator is of course architecture dependent. The x86 version can be found in gnuefi/reloc_ia32.c, the x86_64 version can be found in gnuefi/reloc_x86_64.c and the IA-64 version can be found in gnuefi/reloc_ia64.S.

The self-relocator operates as follows: the startup code invokes it right after EFI has handed off control to the EFI binary at symbol "_start". Upon activation, the self-relocator searches the .dynamic section (whose starting address is given by symbol _DYNAMIC) for the dynamic relocation information, which can be found in the DT_REL, DT_RELSZ, and DT_RELENT entries of the dynamic table (DT_RELA, DT_RELASZ, and DT_RELAENT in the case of rela relocations, as is the case for IA-64). The dynamic relocation information points to the ELF relocation table. Once this table is found, the self-relocator walks through it, applying each relocation one by one. Since the EFI binaries are fully resolved shared objects, only a subset of all possible relocations need to be supported. Specifically, on x86 only the R_386_RELATIVE relocation is needed. On IA-64, the relocations R_IA64_DIR64LSB, R_IA64_REL64LSB, and R_IA64_FPTR64LSB are needed. Note that the R_IA64_FPTR64LSB relocation requires access to the dynamic symbol table. This is why the .dynsym section is included in the EFI binary. Another complication is that this relocation requires memory to hold the function descriptors (aka "procedure labels" or "plabels"). Each function descriptor uses 16 bytes of memory. The IA-64 self-relocator currently reserves a static memory area that can hold 100 of these descriptors. If the self-relocator runs out of space, it causes the EFI binary to fail with error code 5 (EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL). When this happens, the manifest constant MAX_FUNCTION_DESCRIPTORS in gnuefi/reloc_ia64.S should be increased and the application recompiled. An easy way to count the number of function descriptors required by an EFI application is to run the command:

objdump --dynamic-reloc example.so | fgrep FPTR64 | wc -l

assuming "example" is the name of the desired EFI application.

(3) Creating the Function Descriptor for the IA-64 EFI Binaries

As mentioned above, the IA-64 PE32+ format assumes that the entry point of the binary is a function descriptor. A function descriptors consists of two double words: the first one is the code entry point and the second is the global pointer that should be loaded before calling the entry point. Since the ELF toolchain doesn't know how to generate a function descriptor for the entry point, the startup code in gnuefi/crt0-efi-ia64.S crafts one manually by with the code:

        .section .plabel, "a"
_start_plabel:
        data8   _start
        data8   __gp

this places the procedure label for entry point _start in a section called ".plabel". Now, the only problem is that _start and __gp need to be relocated before EFI hands control over to the EFI binary. Fortunately, PE32+ defines a section called ".reloc" that can achieve this. Thus, in addition to manually crafting the function descriptor, the startup code also crafts a ".reloc" section that has will cause the EFI loader to relocate the function descriptor before handing over control to the EFI binary (again, see the PECOFF spec mentioned above for details).

A final question may be why .plabel and .reloc need to go in their own COFF sections. The answer is simply: we need to be able to discard the relocation entries that are generated for these sections. By placing them in these sections, the relocations end up in sections ".rela.plabel" and ".rela.reloc" which makes it easy to filter them out in the filter script. Also, the ".reloc" section needs to be in its own section so that the objcopy program can recognize it and can create the correct directory entries in the PE32+ binary.

(4) Convenient and Portable Generation of UNICODE String Literals

From gnu-efi-3.0, we made use (and somewhat abused) the gcc option that forces wide characters (WCHAR_T) to use short integers (2 bytes) instead of integers (4 bytes). This way we match the Unicode character size. By abuse, we mean that we rely on the fact that the regular ASCII characters are encoded the same way between (short) wide characters and Unicode and basically only use the first byte. This allows us to just use them interchangeably.

The gcc option to force short wide characters is : -fshort-wchar

We have since defined CHAR16 to be char16_t which allows us to use the C11 'u' string literals instead hence avoiding abuse of short wide characters

The End