From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ronald G Minnich Subject: Re: [PATCH] Elf loader fixes Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:11:21 -0700 Message-ID: <43FC8D29.9080008@lanl.gov> References: <43FC4CF6.2010603@suse.de> <43FC6C62.76F0.0078.0@novell.com> <43FC7F59.7030503@suse.de> <43FC919C.76F0.0078.0@novell.com> <43FC8D02.5020908@suse.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <43FC8D02.5020908@suse.de> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Gerd Hoffmann Cc: Xen devel list , Jan Beulich List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Gerd Hoffmann wrote: >>>The elf kernel loader certainly doesn't look like it cares much >>>about virtual address (other than VIRT_BASE) ... >> >>Correct. And the same applies to boot loaders. > > > Well, the difference between xen and other boot loaders is that xen > boots the kernel with paging already enabled ... actually, there have historically been a ton of boot loaders that boot with paging already enabled: just go back to the early Suns; part of the task of SunOS was to move the firmware's page tables to kernel space and use them until it could build its own. I hit this when I ported sunos to a machine with firmware that did not set up page tables. it's been very common, in the non-PC world, to have paging turned on very early. Just a historical comment of no value to this discussion :-) ron