Re: MAINTAINERS file out of date?

H. Peter Anvin
2007-04-27T01:12:54Z

WANG Cong wrote:
>>
>> I have considered myself as a rather unofficial maintainer of this code,
>> and wouldn't mind make it official now when I actually have a job which
>> both cares about and actually can support my upstream Linux activities,
>> which was a major pain for a while.
>>
>> Overall, there is a lot of cleanup which really is needed in the i386
>> boot process; I have done some work on it already, but more is needed.
>
> Sounds interesting. Can you point me what needs to be done exactly? Maybe I can help you. ;)

There was a long thread on the linux-virtualization list
(@lists.linux-foundation.org) just a few days ago. The biggest single
issue right now is probably how we transition from the bootup page
tables to the "real" init_mm page tables, but the real-mode code also
needs a massive overhaul (especially so since this code can and should
be shared with x86-64); in particular I really want to get rid of the
insane segment handling, where segments are constantly recalculated for
no good reason.

For the real-mode stuff, I have some patches already in the works for
this. Eric W. Biederman has also done a lot of work in this area.

-hpa