Re: multiboot2: make multiboot header optional

[Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org>]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 00:41 +0100, tgingold@free.fr wrote:
> Quoting "Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>:
> 
> > On Tuesday 14 November 2006 23:58, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> > > I would like to make the in-kernel multiboot header optional. If it's an
> > > ELF file, we can load it, even if it doesn't have the header. We can
> > > also pass the address of the multiboot tags to its entry point (it can't
> > > hurt anything).
> >
> > I prefer to keep a multiboot header, because GRUB may not detect an error
> > that the offset of a multiboot header is beyond 8192 bytes.
> BTW, on ia64 8192 is too small.  Linux and Xen put the ivt (interrupt vector
> table) at the head of the file because it has the largest alignment
> requirement (32Kb).  I am not sure there is a big enough hole in the ivt.
> And Xen has two ivt (-> 64kB).
> However both Linux and Xen use the ELF format.

Do you have a proposal to solve this problem? Are you advocating
dropping the multiboot header, since we can load ELF files without it?

-Hollis