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Message-ID: <472FC401.9020202@zytor.com>
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:31:45 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
Mikael Petterson <mikpe@...uu.se>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] x86 setup: correct booting on 486 (revised)
Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>
> Another thing it would be nice to add is an elf-note-like notion so that
> the kernel can export arbitrary key/value data to the bootloader (ie,
> the converse of the bootloader->kernel value list). Xen currently does
> this via ELF notes, but any semanically equivalent mechanism would do.
> It's probably simpler than trying to work out how to mush bzimage and
> ELF together.
>
I suspect all we need is an offset-pointer field pointing into the
kernel image. As far as the kernel build process is concerned, it
becomes a section in the boot/compressed link script. That offset then
needs to get exported to the setup.elf link stage and there adjusted to
become a file offset.
The ELF note format is sane enough, although it looks like it's not
self-terminating, so we'd either need an offset and a length field, or
adopt the convention that namesz = descsz = type = 0 terminates the
block (I prefer the latter, myself.) We also need the notes documented,
obviously.
-hpa
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