Re: xen/ia64 and elilo relocation

[Arun Sharma <arun.sharma@intel.com>]

Stephane Eranian wrote:

Hi Stephane,

> elilo loads each block of text/data at the address indicated by the
> paddr of the corresponding program header.
> 
> Are you saying that the address is different only when you abort a load?

Yes, that's right. Other missing piecees of info:

- I was using the elilo shipped with a RHEL4 beta
- my elilo.conf:

image=xen
        label=xen
        initrd=xenlinux
        read-only
        append="nomca console=ttyS1,57600 root=/dev/sda2"

xenlinux is a large uncompressed binary - so it's easy to hit space to 
abort it's loading.

> Note that when an EFI program terminates, the memory is not freed. If we do
> not cleanly free the memory on load abort, then it is possible that the
> designated memory address is unavailable.

elilo.efi didn't exit yet. It dropped me back to the elilo: prompt to 
let me choose an image. I chose the same image a second time and this 
time I saw xen getting loaded at a different address.

> I quickly checked the source code
> and elilo does not try to relocate unless the option "relocatable " is specified
> either globally in elilo.conf or on the Xen image. I also checked the abort
> case and elilo does free the memory allocated for the kernel, as such you should
> be able to retry. 

Someone suggested that the RHEL4 elilo turns relocation on by default to 
support SGI boxes. I'm not sure if it does that by adding a relocatable 
flag to elilo.conf or by changing the code. I checked the SRPM and the 
fedora cvs and can't find a patch which touches the code.

> 
> You can try forcing elilo-3.4/ia64/config.c:ia64_can_relocate() to return 0
> just to make sure this is not the source of the problem.
> 

Yes, I'll check this and let you know.

	-Arun


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