Re: [Xen-devel] EFI and multiboot2 devlopment work for Xen

[Jan Beulich]

>>> Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> 10/23/13 10:32 AM >>>
>The second (standard PE/COFF entry point) can be launched using the UEFI
>chainloader call. AIUI this should work with xen.efi today. There are
>some limitations however, firstly there is no way to pass additional
>blobs and so the launched image must load e.g. dom0 and initrd itself,
>which Linux does by processing the initrd= option in the command line
>and using UEFI functionality to load the blobs from disk. Xen does by
>reading its own config file and loading dom0 + initrd based on that. I
>assume this means that chainload doesn't call ExitBootServices (anyone
>can confirm?). Another limitation of this is that the UEFI functionality
>to load stuff from disk can only read from FAT partitions.

Again that's only a pseudo limitation: Rather than implementing support
for other file systems in GrUB, it should be implemented as EFI module.
Then any subsequent EFI binary would benefit from this. (Obviously, as
a half hearted intermediate solution, GrUB - which iiuc stays in memory
after transferring control - could export its file system support to its
descendants).

> It's not
>clear to me if this mechanism limits only the loading of additional
>blobs from FAT or if that applies to the kernel image itself.

Only the additional blobs would be affected.

> The
>kernel is PIC on entry so no relocations are actually needed. In theory
>the Linux EFI stub could instead have included a NULL relocation table
>but doesn't. (I expect Xen is in the same boat WRT relocations).

No, Xen definitely needs its relocations processed.

Jan

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