From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965531AbXFGAV1 (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 Jun 2007 20:21:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755972AbXFGAVU (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 Jun 2007 20:21:20 -0400 Received: from gw.goop.org ([64.81.55.164]:55206 "EHLO mail.goop.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755655AbXFGAVU (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 Jun 2007 20:21:20 -0400 Message-ID: <46674F68.6030100@goop.org> Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:20:56 -0700 From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (X11/20070302) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "H. Peter Anvin" CC: "Eric W. Biederman" , Vivek Goyal , Rusty Russell , Andi Kleen , v12n , lkml Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 6/7] i386: make the bzImage payload an ELF file References: <20070606225837.654272428@goop.org> <20070606230922.476662240@goop.org> <4667462A.2010404@zytor.com> <466749C8.2010700@goop.org> <46674C96.7090104@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: <46674C96.7090104@zytor.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org H. Peter Anvin wrote: > I was thinking prescriptive, having the decompressor read the output > stream and interpret it as ELF. I guess a descriptive approach could be > made to work, too (I haven't really thought about that avenue of > approach), but the prescriptive model seems more powerful, at least to me. Certainly, but much harder to implement. The ELF parser needs to be prepared to move itself around to get out of the way of the ELF file. It's a fairly large change from how it works now. I was thinking of making the ELF file entirely descriptive, since its just a set of ELF headers inserted into the existing bzImage structure, and it still relies on the bzImage being build properly in the first place. J