Re: Jettisoning init code (was: nfsroot anyone?)

Larry McVoy (lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com)
21 Mar 1996 07:31:09 GMT

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@freya.yggdrasil.com) wrote:
: Followup to: <199603181437.OAA24618@snowcrash.cymru.net>
: By author: Alan Cox <alan@cymru.net>
: In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
: >
: > > I'm going to take a look into this ASAP. However, I don't think implemen-
: > > ting BOOTP into the kernel (as with 1.3.75) is such a good idea. It blows
: > > up the kernel binary for being used just once. This should instead go into
: >
: > This is part of a global Linux memory/segment planning problem. There is no
: > way to put all the init code into a discardable memory area thrown after
: > boot.
: >

: It seems to me that the way to do it would be to have another segment
: for this. I *think* ELF can support more segments than .code and
: .data. Is there any way to get gas/gcc to use them, and if not, how
: hard would it be to hack them to support .initcode and .initdata
: segments?

I strongly urge people to think about Peter's suggestion. ELF is a fine
binary format and it can indeed support more than the segments that are
currently available. SGI made this thing called Dwarf (or maybe someone
else did, I dunno where it came from) when all they needed to do was to
add a few more segs to ELF. It was just hubris as far as I can tell.
Fix ELF to do what you want, it's a fine format.

--

---
Larry McVoy     lm@sgi.com     http://reality.sgi.com/lm     (415) 933-1804
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