Re: [PATCH 2/6] x86/boot: Move compressed kernel to end of decompression buffer

From: Andy Shevchenko
Date: Wed Nov 30 2016 - 11:52:33 EST


On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 12:50 AM, Simon Glass <sjg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> HI Matt,
>
> On 16 August 2016 at 20:25, Matt Mullins <mmullins@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 12:19:42PM -0700, Yinghai Lu wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 9:01 PM, Matt Mullins <mmullins@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > This appears to have a negative effect on booting the Intel Edison platform, as
>>> > it uses u-boot as its bootloader. u-boot does not copy the init_size parameter
>>> > when booting a bzImage: it copies a fixed-size setup_header [1], and its
>>> > definition of setup_header doesn't include the parameters beyond setup_data [2].
>>> >
>>> > With a zero value for init_size, this calculates a %rsp value of 0x101ff9600.
>>> > This causes the boot process to hard-stop at the immediately-following pushq, as
>>> > this platform has no usable physical addresses above 4G.
>>> >
>>> > What are the options for getting this type of platform to function again? For
>>> > now, kexec from a working Linux system does seem to be a work-around, but there
>>> > appears to be other x86 hardware using u-boot: the chromium.org folks seem to be
>>> > maintaining the u-boot x86 tree.
>>> >
>>> > [1] http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob;f=arch/x86/lib/zimage.c;h=1b33c771391f49ffe82864ff1582bdfd07e5e97d;hb=HEAD#l156
>>> > [2] http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob;f=arch/x86/include/asm/bootparam.h;h=140095117e5a2daef0a097c55f0ed10e08acc781;hb=HEAD#l24
>>>
>>> Then should fix the u-boot about header_size assumption.
>>
>> I was hoping to avoid that, since the Edison's u-boot is 10,000-line patch atop
>> the upstream -- I don't trust myself to build and flash one quite yet.
>
> It would be good to upstream that!
>
>>
>> If this turned out to affect Chromebooks, I'd spend more effort pushing for
>> a kernel fix, but it seems that ChromeOS has a different kernel load procedure
>> and doesn't use "zboot". For now, I'll probably just keep a local patch that
>> hard-codes a value large enough to decompress and launch the kernel.
>>
>> I may turn that local patch into something gated by a Kconfig eventually, in
>> hopes that users of the other x86 u-boot platforms will see it in a "make
>> oldconfig" run.
>
> Well, I think this patch is useful. But also, let's fix U-Boot.

Found this late.

Anyway, I have got same issue [1] and basically what I did, I just
deuglified a bit that monster hack pile for U-Boot to build my own
fork of most recent one [2].
For now on I have working x86_64 kernel directly and newest U-Boot.

[1] https://github.com/andy-shev/linux/issues/3
[2] https://github.com/andy-shev/u-boot/tree/edison

--
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko