New SILO (was Re: [SOLVED] Take 3: sparc64 CDs work?)

New SILO (was Re: [SOLVED] Take 3: sparc64 CDs work?)

[Ben Collins]

I did some checking, and the newer memory allocation in SILO was not
verifying that the initrd physical location was in the lower 32-bits
address range. The kernel only accepts a 32-bit address range for
initrd's. I re-added the check, so now SILO will put out a decent
failure.

I suspect that in the long run, I really need to make it so that the
initrd gets lower memory precendence over the kernel. The kernel itself
can be loaded anywhere for sparc64, even in 64-bit address ranges.

But for now, I am about to release SILO 1.4.6 to atleast make this less
of a mystery on systems where it fails.

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Re: New SILO (was Re: [SOLVED] Take 3: sparc64 CDs work?)

[Ben Collins]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 12:41:25PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 13:08:22 -0400
> Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > I suspect that in the long run, I really need to make it so that the
> > initrd gets lower memory precendence over the kernel. The kernel itself
> > can be loaded anywhere for sparc64, even in 64-bit address ranges.
> > 
> > But for now, I am about to release SILO 1.4.6 to atleast make this less
> > of a mystery on systems where it fails.
> 
> I have a better idea, remove the 32-bit limitation.
> 
> Create a new HdrS version, add a new member at the end of the bootloader
> header area "sparc_ramdisk_image64", set it to ~0 by default, if the
> bootloader sets it to some non-~0 value, we use it instead of the
> 32-bit limited sparc_ramdisk_image value.

The downside is that I need to load and evaluate the kernel before
loading the initrd in order for it to work. I was already considering
this, but I need to make sure I don't get into a chicken and egg
situation like I did with the feature to load the kernel to a non-zero
location.

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Re: New SILO (was Re: [SOLVED] Take 3: sparc64 CDs work?)

[David S. Miller]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 13:08:22 -0400
Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> wrote:

> I suspect that in the long run, I really need to make it so that the
> initrd gets lower memory precendence over the kernel. The kernel itself
> can be loaded anywhere for sparc64, even in 64-bit address ranges.
> 
> But for now, I am about to release SILO 1.4.6 to atleast make this less
> of a mystery on systems where it fails.

I have a better idea, remove the 32-bit limitation.

Create a new HdrS version, add a new member at the end of the bootloader
header area "sparc_ramdisk_image64", set it to ~0 by default, if the
bootloader sets it to some non-~0 value, we use it instead of the
32-bit limited sparc_ramdisk_image value.