Re: multiboot2: remove "a.out kludge" requirement

[Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org>]

On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 10:26 +0000, Brano Zarnovican wrote:
> On 11/17/06, Andrei E. Warkentin <andrey.warkentin@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > How about having a custom e_type for ELF images booted by GRUB? Something in
> 
> Guys at Xen solved it nicely with custom ELF section. Somewhere in
> your OS code you create a section with specific name, bootloader will
> be looking for. For multiboot it might look like:
> 
> .section __multiboot_v2
>         .long MAGIC_THIS
>         .long FLAGS_THAT

Sections are for linkers; segments are for loaders. GRUB loads ELF files
by segment, which is why I suggested a PT_LOAD segment.

> Header position is exactly defined in ELF which Grub already speaks.
> It does not need to be in first 8kB. The downside is that it will make
> multiboot ELF-only.

That is a non-starter I'm afraid. Not that I care much about non-ELF
kernels personally, but we must support them.

Of course we could simply say that some other method is needed for
non-ELF files.

-Hollis