From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 In-Reply-To: <19991122144054.C12973@hq.fsmlabs.com> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 11:40:01 +0100 To: Cort Dougan , linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org, paulus@linuxcare.com From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Subject: Re: bootloader & head.S weirdness (patch) Message-Id: <19991123114001.002761@mailhost.mipsys.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: On Mon, Nov 22, 1999, Cort Dougan wrote: >I'll check this patch with the latest 2.2 to see how it goes. Would using >the bootinfo structure we talked about a few weeks ago help? I'd like to >unify things a bit with it but I'm not sure how many problems it would >solve and how many it could cause. I'd really like to see this happen. There is really an urgent need to cleanup the mess with initrd and the way the command line is passed to the kernel too and this would get rid of those. There is one idea suggested to me by Gabriel Paubert which would be worth considering: Define some kind of bootx-like bootinfo structure (will all addresses relative to the beginning of the structure) and move out of the kernel _all_ those head.S hacks AND all the prom_init code (reading the OF tree, initing the display, instanciating RTAS, ...). All this would be done from a head-appended bootloader which would built a device tree when OF is available, and then enter the kernel with a unified entry point based on a structure, known mappings. I don't know if it's worth doing that _now_ (it involves almost breaking everything), but I like the idea of cleaning all this up. ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/