Re: [PATCH] domain builder for ReactOS

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Christian Limpach wrote:
> On 6/6/05, Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk> wrote:
> 
> The model you suggest requires you to install the kernel such that it
> is accessible from within the guest environment.  This is not always
> desirable nor practical.
> [some off-list exchange skipped]
> I like the loader + "ramdisk" solution.  Can you reuse the code we
> have in the builder now to load elf, elf w/ symtab and bin images? 
> Isn't the development environment for the loader too hostile?  I
> implemented a similar loader for NetBSD when the linux dom0 loader
> didn't support elf yet -- it was quite tedious to relocate stuff in
> memory so that the layout would be the same for the loader and the
> image it would execute...

My code is a port of the loader as per last autumn (I forward-ported my
old code to the new Xen), so right now it only loads ELF, I guess I
could work in later changes as well.

You are right that developing stage2 loaders is harder than writing
Linux binaries, though with a serial cable things are not too bad. The
worst part is turning over control to the OS itself, because you need a
temporary overlap of address spaces, and you would like to free some of
the original domain memory, or at least hand it over the OS.

Jacob