Re: RFC/Patch: Support for other bootloaders

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Tim Deegan wrote:

>On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 03:52:32PM -0000, Ian Pratt wrote:
>  
>
>>[*] would it possible to do something whereby the vmlinuz and initrd
>>image were simply cat'ed together? This might swing the balance the
>>other way from a userbility POV, not sure.
>>    
>>
>
>It should be.  xen-vmlinux is an ELF, so if we can be *sure* that the
>largest file offset in an ELF header is the same as the size of the
>file, then it would be possible to just do
>  
>
The problem with something like this is that it's very Linux specific.  
If we every support a dom0 other than Linux, it's entirely conceivable 
that that OS may require two boot-time modules instead of just one.

The multiboot shim allows for that.  Also, it's likely that there will 
be a scenario where using something other than the Linux boot protocol 
is desirable.  The multiboot shim could handle take care of that also.

It keeps an awful lot of ugliness out of Xen.

Regards,
Anthony Liguori


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by Microsoft Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005
Attend MEDC 2005 May 9-12 in Vegas. Learn more about the latest Windows
Embedded(r) & Windows Mobile(tm) platforms, applications & content.  Register
by 3/29 & save $300 http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6883&alloc_id=15149&op=click