linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/1] x86 support for the initrd= command line option

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Message-ID: <A814A71D-0450-4724-885B-859BCD2B7CBD@zytor.com>
Date:   Mon, 23 Mar 2020 11:19:21 -0700
From:   hpa@...or.com
To:     Matthew Garrett <mjg59@...gle.com>
CC:     ron minnich <rminnich@...il.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        "maintainer:X86 ARCHITECTURE..." <x86@...nel.org>,
        lkml - Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] x86 support for the initrd= command line option

On March 20, 2020 11:19:19 AM PDT, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@...gle.com> wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 5:59 PM <hpa@...or.com> wrote:
>
>> It has been designated consumed by the bootloader on x86 since at
>least 1995. So ARM broke it.
>
>Eh. This feels like a matter of semantics - booting the kernel via EFI
>results in it being parsed by the boot stub, so in that case we're
>left arguing that the boot stub isn't the kernel. I can just about buy
>that, but it's a stretch. For this change to actually break something,
>we'd need the bootloader to be passing something that the kernel
>parses, but not actually populating the initrd fields in bootparams.
>That seems unlikely?

You are right as long as this is the very last priority *and* neither boot loaders nor the kernel will croak on unexpected input (I really object to Ron calling the non-x86 version "standard", but that's a whole other ball of wax.)

Pointing to any number of memory chunks via setup_data works and doesn't need to be exposed to the user, but I guess the above is reasonable.

*However*, I would also suggest adding "initrdmem=" across architectures that doesn't have the ambiguity.
-- 
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