[ANN] yaboot maintainer change

[ANN] yaboot maintainer change

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

Hi all !

The maintenance of yaboot releases & packaging will now be handled by
Ethan Benson. He should shortly release 1.3 (which is the same as 1.2.5
code wise for those who caught it), the version bump is here to avoid
confusion with versions I released.

The archives of older versions on my page will remain, users should
however now get their versions from Ethan, I'll let him explain that all.

I still maintain the actual code for yaboot and the yaboot source rsync
repository, so you can still feed me with bug reports ;)

Regards,
Ben.

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Re: [ANN] yaboot maintainer change

[Ethan Benson]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 05:09:39PM +0200, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> Hi all !
>
> The maintenance of yaboot releases & packaging will now be handled by
> Ethan Benson. He should shortly release 1.3 (which is the same as 1.2.5
> code wise for those who caught it), the version bump is here to avoid
> confusion with versions I released.
>
> The archives of older versions on my page will remain, users should
> however now get their versions from Ethan, I'll let him explain that all.

Basically the main goal of this is to merge ybin and yaboot into a
single unified source tree.  In the past yaboot contained virtually no
documentation and no userland installation and configuration tools,
those were only part of the ybin distribution.  Now both ybin and
yaboot are part of the same source tree, which I will call yaboot.

The distribution pages will be:

http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/yaboot

and http://penguinppc.org/usr/yaboot

the old ~erbenson/ybin and /usr/ybin links will continue to work
indefinitly, you will however get the exact same page (they are just
symlinks now).

Before ybin-X.Y.Z.tar.gz required no compilation since ybin is writtin
in sh rather then C, now that this is a single tree containing yaboot,
you will have to compile the source to get binaries, if this is
impossible i have also provided a binary tarball dist
yaboot-binary-X.Y.Z.tar.gz.  I highly recommend compiling and
installing from the source tarball over the binary tarball however.

the source tree is in the yaboot-1.3.tar.gz tarball, precompiled
binary dist is in yaboot-binary-1.3.tar.gz

Distributions who have in the past distributed separate ybin and
yaboot packages should merge them into a single yaboot package.

As I have done in the past these tarballs are signed with my GnuPG
key, verifying these signatures is as always highly recommended.

The current web page is still mostly the same as the ybin page, I will
eventually redo this, and probably rewrite the README (which is also
pretty much just ybin's).  these are non-technical merging issues
however.

I have released version 1.3, it's available at the above URLs.  I will
probably release a 1.3.1 within the next day or two to change a couple
aspects about the binary dist tarball (don't include ./etc/yaboot.conf).

comments and suggestions are welcome, flames should go to /dev/null.

Enjoy.

--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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Re: [ANN] yaboot maintainer change

[Peter Bergner]

Ethan Benson wrote:
: comments and suggestions are welcome, flames should go to /dev/null.

Just a little nit, but some people might be interested, as part
of the "Various ppc64 & chrp fixes by Peter Bergner", we also
added support for booting compressed images (ie, zImage).


Peter

--
Peter Bergner
SLIC Optimizing Translator Development / Linux PPC64 Kernel Development
IBM Rochester, MN
bergner@us.ibm.com


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Re: [ANN] yaboot maintainer change

[Tom Rini]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 11:49:51AM -0500, Peter Bergner wrote:

> Ethan Benson wrote:
> : comments and suggestions are welcome, flames should go to /dev/null.
>
> Just a little nit, but some people might be interested, as part
> of the "Various ppc64 & chrp fixes by Peter Bergner", we also
> added support for booting compressed images (ie, zImage).

As in objcopy ... && gzip -9 or the 'zImage' target?  They aren't exactly
the same..

--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[hollis]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 11:20:47AM -0700, Tom Rini wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 11:49:51AM -0500, Peter Bergner wrote:
> >
> > Just a little nit, but some people might be interested, as part
> > of the "Various ppc64 & chrp fixes by Peter Bergner", we also
> > added support for booting compressed images (ie, zImage).
>
> As in objcopy ... && gzip -9 or the 'zImage' target?  They aren't exactly
> the same..

I've booted a zImage.rs6k-chrp from yaboot 1.2.5.

-Hollis

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[Tom Rini]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 01:29:04PM +0000, hollis@austin.ibm.com wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 11:20:47AM -0700, Tom Rini wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 11:49:51AM -0500, Peter Bergner wrote:
> > >
> > > Just a little nit, but some people might be interested, as part
> > > of the "Various ppc64 & chrp fixes by Peter Bergner", we also
> > > added support for booting compressed images (ie, zImage).
> >
> > As in objcopy ... && gzip -9 or the 'zImage' target?  They aren't exactly
> > the same..
>
> I've booted a zImage.rs6k-chrp from yaboot 1.2.5.

That almost sounds silly.  I guess I should try and find the code, but I'm
guessing it copies from an FS into memory and then runs that?  yaboot doesn't
do compression yet, yes?

--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[Peter Bergner]

Sorry, I should have been a little more explicit.  Yes, I meant to
say zImage (including zImage.initrd, duh).  No, yaboot does not
do compression.

The only reason we couldn't boot zImages before, was that yaboot
_always_ loaded the image from the FS into memory at KERNELADDR.
This is what vmlinux wants/expects.  OTOH, zImage (or any other
program) expects to be loaded into memory where it was linked at.
The code now detects if we're loading a vmlinux or not.  If it's a
vmlinux, then yaboot loads the image at KERNELADDR, otherwise it
loads it at the p_vaddr value for each ELF segment.

To detect if we're loading a vmlinux, we look at the e_entry value and
if it is equal to 0xC0000000 for ELF32 or 0xC000000000000000 for ELF64,
then we _assume_ it's a vmlinux.


Peter

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[Dan Malek]

Tom Rini wrote:

> > I've booted a zImage.rs6k-chrp from yaboot 1.2.5.
>
> That almost sounds silly.

Actually, it's not very silly at all.  The zImage is significantly
smaller than a corresponding vmlinux, so it takes much less time
to load the image.

Also, many systems claim the lower memory where we want to load
the kernel.  The only option is the load it in some higher
memory hole, and then have it copy itself.  You may as well
uncompress at the same time....


	-- Dan

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[Tom Rini]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 05:05:20PM -0400, Dan Malek wrote:
> Tom Rini wrote:
>
> > > I've booted a zImage.rs6k-chrp from yaboot 1.2.5.
> >
> > That almost sounds silly.
>
> Actually, it's not very silly at all.  The zImage is significantly
> smaller than a corresponding vmlinux, so it takes much less time
> to load the image.

Yes, but it almost sounds silly since yaboot is a full blow bootloader.
Fer instance even, imho it'd make more sense for yaboot to take the
objcopy'ed & gzip'ed vmlinux and throw that at KERNELADDR or so.

> Also, many systems claim the lower memory where we want to load
> the kernel.  The only option is the load it in some higher
> memory hole, and then have it copy itself.  You may as well
> uncompress at the same time....

Yes, but if we've already loaded yaboot, couldn't we do the same thing
you're saying with a vmlinux.gz?

--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/

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Re: yaboot & zImage's

[Ethan Benson]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 03:44:20PM -0700, Tom Rini wrote:

> Yes, but if we've already loaded yaboot, couldn't we do the same thing
> you're saying with a vmlinux.gz?

sure, thats why silo does.

--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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