Re: [PATCH] generic ELF loading

[Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org>]

On Sat, 2006-10-14 at 17:33 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> On Saturday 14 October 2006 00:37, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> > This patch adds generic ELF loading infrastructure for both 32-bit and
> > 64-bit ELF. It provides an "iterate" function for program headers, and a
> > "load" function for convenience.
> 
> The idea is very good. But I don't like that loaded areas are always allocated 
> from the heap. GRUB has a staging area for OS images on i386-pc, and I prefer 
> to load an image directly instead of consuming the heap.

Actually I'm not using the heap, I'm just directly copying wherever
phdr->p_paddr says to. That's not a good thing actually; in the future
we should add some error checking to make sure we don't clobber GRUB
itself.

Also, I made sure that the load hook could veto loading each segment. So
the x86 loader would do something like this:

        int x86_load_hook (Elf32_Phdr *phdr)
        {
        	if (phdr->p_paddr not in x86 OS load area)
        		return 1;
        	return 0;
        }
        
        grub_elf32_load (elf, x86_load_hook);

-Hollis