Re: [PATCH] Compressed ia32 ELF file generation for loading by Gujin 1/3

Eric W. Biederman
2007-02-06T07:25:10Z

Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 10:38:30PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Vivek Goyal wrote:
>> >
>> >That time, grub was working fine but lilo had broken on one of Andrew's
>> >machine. I could not reproduce the problem on my setup and had no clue what
>> >was the issue. Hence got rid of ELF header from bzImage which was
>> >non-essential
>> >stuff for relocatable kernel. But that issue should be fixable.
>> >
>>
>> Either way, though, putting Gujin-specific code in the main kernel
>> output is a pretty dull thud.
>>
>
> Agreed.

Just for documentation the current interface is you come in through
the kernels 16bit entry point and get all of it's BIOS calls, or your
bootloader is responsible for getting the equivalent information
somehow.

>From what little I skimmed part of what Gujin wanted to do was sane
at first glance. Just boot a gziped vmlinux like the other
architectures. The problem was the 16bit code.

So there may be some good ideas buried in there somewhere, but it
likely to take some doing, and patches that I have to save before
I read them are a real pain!

Eric