EFI e820 map handling

Andi Kleen
2007-08-09T10:06:54Z

Hallo,

I thought a bit about the zero page problem. I really would prefer to not
having it used in a boot loader right now because it's not extensible anymore
when external users start (ab)using it.

When I asked for separate EFI->e820 functions I was really thinking
of the kernel to do the conversion; not the boot loader.

Could you move that code into the kernel early boot code please?
e.g. on x86-64 it could be in head64.c. It could stuff the result
into the zero page to pass it cleanly on without special cases later.

On i386 a head32.c that runs before start_kernel() could be also
introduced for this.

As long as it's localized there it is fine.

This would also allow to define new private e820 types and extend
the string decoding in e820; so that dmesg will correctly contain

EFI: ....

instead of

BIOS-e820: ...

Thanks,

-Andi