[Qemu-devel] Should qemu -kernel option be able to gunzip kernel? (aarch64)

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>]

On Fedora/aarch64, the kernel in /boot is a gzip-compressed file:

$ file /boot/vmlinuz-*
/boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-520be7dc677d4fab99d3d3ce91f90c84: gzip compressed data, max compression, from Unix
/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj2.fc22.aarch64:    gzip compressed data, max compression, from Unix
/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj3.fc22.aarch64:    gzip compressed data, max compression, from Unix
/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.rc6.git3.1.rwmj4.fc22.aarch64:    gzip compressed data, max compression, from Unix

[not just for the custom kernels I've been building ...]

Apparently UEFI and u-boot can just handle this by uncompressing the
kernel on the fly.

However qemu-system-aarch64 -kernel option definitely can*not*, with
the result that if you do the "obvious":

  qemu-system-aarch64 -kernel /boot/vmlinuz-xxx

it just hangs immediately, because it's trying to execute gzip data.

I don't know the rights and wrongs of this.  Maybe Fedora is wrong for
having a gzip-compressed kernel.  But should the -kernel option be
able to detect if the file is gzip encoded and uncompress it on the
fly?  (If so I'll post a patch for this unless someone else jumps in).

Mainly I'm asking because I've no idea what is the right thing to do
here.  There could be another obvious fix.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top