On 8/2/06, Eric W. Biederman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Magnus Damm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Eric, could you please list the advantages of your run-time relocation > > code over my incomplete relocate-in-userspace prototype posted to > > fastboot a few weeks ago? > > If you watch an architecture evolve one thing you will notice is that > the kinds of relocations keep growing. An ever growing list of things > to for the bootloader to do is a pain. Especially when bootloaders > generally need to be as simple and as fixed as possible because bootloaders > are not something you generally want to update.
I agree that updating bootloaders is something you want to avoid. I'm not however sure that I would call kexec-tools a bootloader... > Beyond that if you look at head.S the code to process the relocations > (after I have finished post processing them at build time) is 9 instructions. > Which is absolutely trivial, at least for now. Yeah, but the 33 patches are touching more than 9 instructions. =) > By keeping the bzImage processing the relocations we have kept the > bootloader/kernel interface simple. Agreed. I think your patch makes sense. > > One thing I know for sure is that your implementation supports bzImage > > while my only supports relocation of vmlinux files. Are there any > > other uses for relocatable bzImage except kdump? > > I can't think of any volume users. A hypervisor that would actually report > the real physical addresses would be a candidate. It's a general purpose > facility so if it is interesting users will show up. Static > relocation has already found another use on x86_64. > > There are definitely users of an ELF bzImage beyond the kdump case. > Anything that doesn't have a traditional 16bit BIOS on it. LinuxBIOS, > and Xen, and some others. > > Not having to keep track of anything but your bzImage to boot is also > a serious advantage. It's the one binary to rule them all. :) One binary to rule them all... If that is true, is there any simple way then to extract vmlinux from the bzImage? Thanks! / magnus _______________________________________________ fastboot mailing list [email protected] https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/fastboot
