Re: [Fastboot] [CFT] kexec syscall for 2.5.43 (linux booting linux)

[Werner Almesberger <wa@almesberger.net>]

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Oh, wait as I recall bootimg simply copies the BIOS results
> from the current kernel to the freshly booted kernel, so it skips
> the BIOS calls altogether.

Yes, I don't trust the BIOS very much under normal conditions,
so I wouldn't even dream of running it with a largely undefined
system state. I'm actually quite surprised that kexec has so
few problems doing that :-)

In any case, since the kexec kernel code is more or less just a
generic loader, this is something you can always decide to
change in user space. The only thing bootimg did that kexec
doesn't do is to explicitly mark BIOS-provided data tables
(mainly SMP stuff) as reserved so that they won't be
overwritten. But it seems that mpparse.c now reserves that
already, so kexec should be fine.

- Werner

-- 
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 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina         wa@almesberger.net /
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