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Message-ID: <4702E683.3060907@zytor.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:46:59 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC: Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>,
lkml - Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...ibm.com>, lguest <lguest@...abs.org>,
"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/5] Boot protocol changes
H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> No, not at all.
>
> I'm proposing that the existing bzImage format be retained, but that the
> payload of the decompressor (already a gzip file) simply be vmlinux.gz
> -- i.e. a gzip compressed ELF file, notes and all. A pointer in the
> header will point to the offset of the payload (this is new, obviously.)
>
> The decompression stub is adjusted to expect an ELF image, instead of a
> raw binary.
>
> Existing bootloaders (16- or 32-bit) simply load the bzImage the way
> they do now; new bootloaders have the option of accessing the vmlinux.gz
> directly if they either want to load it themselves or want to examine
> the notes.
>
Slight correction: it does, of course, break loaders which root through
the bzImage for a gzip header and decode that themselves and place in
memory. These loaders are pretty broken, though; they can't deal with
the fact that the physical address of the kernel is configurable, for
one thing.
-hpa
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