Booting in EMIFA ROM Direct Boot mode

Hi everyone

I have to boot my DM6437 in EMIFA ROM Direct Boot mode. This is not optmal (as I found out here: http://e2e.ti.com/forums/t/10054.aspx) but I'm tied into this on our current hardware version.

I'm having some trouble in configuring all the sections in my .hex file. I believe setting up my project for bootloading should go something like this:

1) Write an assembly language bootloader to load my code from flash to RAM.

2) Setup the memory configuration use different load and run addresses for all the relavant sections.

3) Use the hex6x tool to convert my compiled .out (COFF) file to .hex format.

4) Use flashburn (or similar) to load this .hex file to flash.

I've done all the above using a flashburn example not using DSP/BIOS, and this works fine. In a DSP/BIOS application step 2) needs to be done through the .tcf file:

1) Define new memory sections for the bootloader and application flash, specifying the new memory sections as code.

2) Set all memory sections to load from application flash using the dropdown menus on the Memory->Load address tab in the .tcf configuration.

My problem is that hex6x complains about sections .args, .trace, .sts, and .log falling in unconfigured memory. This makes sense, as Memory->Load does not have dropdowns to specify loading addresses for these sections, which means they load from their run time (RAM) addresses. Some of these sections contain code (.sts contains an .obj file generated from the .cfs configuration scrpt), and as such I don't think this will run without proper initialisation.

If this had been a non DSP/BIOS app., fixing this would have been a simple case of editing the .cmd file. Here this won't work, since the DSP/BIOS configuration script will overwrite any changes I make to the generated linker configuration of these sections. How should I go about solving this problem?

I'd appreciate any suggestions/comments.

Leon de Wit