Previous

Next

Locating a Program

Locating an application is accomplished using program RTLoc. It requires two sources of input: An .EXE file (and possibly one or more DLLs) produced by a 32-bit compiler/linker and a configuration file. The output is an absolute binary file (extension .RTB, RTTarget-32 Binary) and a listing file (extension .LOC) which contains information similar to a linker map file. The configuration file specifies how to map the program onto the given hardware.

Here is a short example configuration file for a simple program compiled with Borland C++:

Region  MyRAM      0h  256k  RAM 
Region  MyROM  F0000h   64k  ROM 

Locate  Header     Header  MyROM 
Locate  NTSection  CODE    MyROM 
Locate  NTSection  DATA    MyRAM 
Locate  Stack      Stack   MyRAM  16k 
Locate  Heap       Heap    MyRAM

First, two regions of memory are defined using Region commands. The first is named MyRAM at address 0, size 256k. The second section MyROM is located at address F0000h, and is 64k bytes long. Its type is ROM. The Locate commands instruct RTLoc which parts of the program to map to which regions. The Header is required by the boot code. It contains information about where the application is located, its entrypoint, etc. NTSections are data read from the .EXE file. RTLoc will determine their sizes from information in the .EXE file. The stack and heap are only allocated; initially, there is no data associated with them. The stack size is fixed at 16k in this example. Since we did not specify a size for the heap, RTLoc will assign all remaining space in region MyRAM to the heap.

After running RTLoc, the .LOC file will contain the following Relocation Report (and several other reports):

[Relocation Report] 

Name        Address   Size      Image    Access 
----------------------------------------------- 
MyRAM       00000000  00040000  00040000 
   DATA     00000000  00002000  00001200 ReadWrite 
   Stack    00002000  00004000  00000000 ReadWrite 
   Heap     00006000  0003A000  00000000 NoAccess 
MyROM       000F0000  00010000  00006000 
   Header   000F0000  00000096  00000096 ReadOnly 
   CODE     000F1000  00005000  00004A00 ReadOnly

All regions are listed with their respective locations, sizes, and space used. Indented below each region, all entities allocated to the region are listed with their locations, sizes, and data image sizes.

This example may seem trivial; real configurations can be more complex. For example, you could have several disjoint RAM and ROM regions as well as DEVICE regions, virtual regions, DLLs, etc. Section RTLoc: Locating a Program covers configuration files in detail.

Running Win32 Programs without Win32

Preparing a Program for RTTarget-32

Cross Debugging a Program