From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list linux-mips); Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:39:22 +0200 (CEST) Received: from localhost.localdomain ([127.0.0.1]:49660 "EHLO h5.dl5rb.org.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by ftp.linux-mips.org with ESMTP id S1493632AbZJMUjT (ORCPT ); Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:39:19 +0200 Received: from h5.dl5rb.org.uk (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by h5.dl5rb.org.uk (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id n9DKeY9v004082; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:40:34 +0200 Received: (from ralf@localhost) by h5.dl5rb.org.uk (8.14.3/8.14.3/Submit) id n9DKeUJI004080; Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:40:30 +0200 Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:40:29 +0200 From: Ralf Baechle To: Dmitri Vorobiev Cc: Linux-MIPS , davem@davemloft.net Subject: Re: [RFC] [IP22] parsing PROM variables at startup Message-ID: <20091013204029.GC727@linux-mips.org> References: <90edad820910131055t3cb46d39t87fa568c001634cf@mail.gmail.com> <20091013195822.GA2686@linux-mips.org> <90edad820910131330t67d6b293o150bef62aec0c5eb@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: <90edad820910131330t67d6b293o150bef62aec0c5eb@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.19 (2009-01-05) Return-Path: X-Envelope-To: <"|/home/ecartis/ecartis -s linux-mips"> (uid 0) X-Orcpt: rfc822;linux-mips@linux-mips.org Original-Recipient: rfc822;linux-mips@linux-mips.org X-archive-position: 24281 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: linux-mips-bounce@linux-mips.org Errors-to: linux-mips-bounce@linux-mips.org X-original-sender: ralf@linux-mips.org Precedence: bulk X-list: linux-mips On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 11:30:29PM +0300, Dmitri Vorobiev wrote: > >> I tried booting a few kernels, ranging from 2.2.1 to the current Linus > >> Git, on my IP22s using an ecoff image directly, without the help of > >> arcboot or tip22. It turns out that during many years (at least, since > >> the times of late 2.4 series) the sizes of ecoff images have been so > >> big that ARCS was not capable of reading the kernel images. Therefore, > >> I'd like to claim that it's safe to assume that at least from now on, > >> nobody is ever going to boot ecoffs on IP22 whatsoever, and arcboot > >> and tip22 remain the only way to load Linux on an IP22 machine. > > > > Only the very oldest IP22 firmware does not support ELF files.  In practice > > those seem to be very rare - I never encountered one - and Linux > > distributions are shipping a 2nd stage bootloader, so there never has > > been much of a need for booting ECOFF, at least not on Indy. > > That is, it's safe to assume that it's either a 32-bit ELF or a 2nd > stage bootloader that gets loaded by the firmware. Yes. The IP22 firmware does not support 64-bit ELF, so 64-bit kernels have to be converted to 32-bit ELF for booting first. The vmlinux.32 target does that. Ralf