Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> I have come to agree with this sentiment.
Great !
> However I do have a small issue with the current bootimg api.
> Everything is done in page sized chunks. Which feels like it is
> exporting too much of the current implementation.
Well, it keeps things simple for the kernel, and bootimg(8) needs
to know the target architecture anyway. But there isn't really a
design reason why it would have to use pages, agreed.
> Except for the case of Loadlin where the old firmware is destroyed,
> and you cannot requery the firmware. You have a more robust solution
> if you let the new kernel query the firmware itself.
Yes, I was thinking of
- BIOS does IDE bus scan, boots boot loader kernel
- first kernel does IDE bus scan again, boots real kernel
- real kernel does IDE bus scan again
It should be possible to avoid at least the third IDE bus scan, at
least as an optimization.
> For the most part I agree, that the bootimg type interface will avoid
> bloat. At the same time, some of this information that we would like
> to pass is easier to get at in kernel space, oh well.
You can always look it up in /dev/mem, just like bootimg(1) did :-)
BTW, that's what I like about this approach: incremental development
is much easier this way, and you can hide all the ugly spots in the
library, if necessary.
> I will stop just a moment to say it is extremely nasty to read the ELF
> section header instead of the ELF program header for boot purposes.
> For an ELF static executable it is totally valid not to have a section
> header.
Touche ;-) I admit that I'm not much of an ELF expert. This was just
a surprisingly easy hack, so I was content with what I got.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Lausanne, CH wa@almesberger.net / /_http://icawww.epfl.ch/almesberger/_____________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 07 2002 - 21:00:37 EST