Re: [PATCH] MIPS: Octeon: add option to ignore PT_NOTE section

[David Daney <ddaney@caviumnetworks.com>]

On 04/15/2011 01:55 AM, Philby John wrote:
> On 04/15/2011 01:54 PM, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On Wednesday 13 April 2011 19:38:02 David Daney wrote:
>>> On 04/13/2011 09:07 AM, philby john wrote:
>>>> From: Philby John<pjohn@mvista.com>
>>>
>>> ^^^^^^^^ I believe that statement to be not entirely correct.
>>>
>>> Perhaps you should change it to something like:
>>> From: David Daney<ddaney@caviumnetworks.com>
>>>
>>>> Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:46:32 +0530
>>>> Subject: [PATCH] MIPS: Octeon: add option to ignore PT_NOTE section
>>>>
>>>> Some early Octeon bootloaders cannot process PT_NOTE program
>>>> headers as reported in numerous sections of the web, here is
>>>> an example http://www.spinics.net/lists/mips/msg37799.html
>>>> Loading usually fails with such an error ...
>>>> Error allocating memory for elf image!
>>>>
>>>> The work around usually is to strip the .notes section by using
>>>> such a command $mips-gnu-strip -R .notes vmlinux -o fixed-vmlinux
>>>> It is expected that the vmlinux image got after compilation be
>>>> bootable. Add a Kconfig option to ignore the PT_NOTE section.
>>
>> Do we really want this to be in the kernel? In my opinion, this is a fixup
>> which distributions should be aware of, but not necessarily take place here in
>> the kernel Makefiles.
>
> You are right in one way. But as an OS vendor company we will definitely
> include this patch in our distribution. This incident has been reported
> many a times and its a pain to see the image not boot up, throw up an
> error, with the user having to search the work around on the web. What
> we are trying to do is save all that trouble. If it can be fixed why not
> fix it.
>

I don't care one way or another.  We too (perhaps one and the same...) 
provide kernels to our SDK customers with the patch applied.

An alternative approach would be to put the $(CROSS_COMPILE)strip 
command into the arch/mips/Makefile.

David Daney