Re: [PATCH 0/5] Relocatable 64-bit kernel using linker PIE support

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 11:27 +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> The following series of patches implement support for a relocatable
> kernel by building it as a position-independent executable (PIE).
> When the linker is given the -pie flag, it creates an executable that
> contains dynamic relocations which can be used to relocate the image
> at boot time for any desired base address.  This patch series adds a
> CONFIG_RELOCATABLE config option for 64-bit which links the kernel
> with -pie and arranges to process the relocations in early boot.
> 
> With the first 4 patches applied, a relocatable kernel will still copy
> itself down to real address 0.  The last patch changes things so that
> a relocatable kernel will run wherever it was loaded.  This last patch
> is pretty much just a proof of concept since it doesn't do anything to
> ensure appropriate alignment of the base address (the base address
> needs to be 16kB aligned).  We probably want to work out whether we
> are a kdump kernel and run in-place if so, or copy down to 0 if not.

Is this mature enough for us to consider putting it in Fedora? We'd
_love_ to stop building a separate kdump kernel for ppc64...

-- 
dwmw2