From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933625AbXFGQPw (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:15:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932673AbXFGQPg (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:15:36 -0400 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([192.83.249.54]:51898 "EHLO terminus.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932211AbXFGQPf (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:15:35 -0400 Message-ID: <46682EFA.1020406@zytor.com> Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:14:50 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 (X11/20070419) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Rob Landley CC: Jeremy Fitzhardinge , "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> <200706062147.21225.rob@landley.net> <46676552.4060308@zytor.com> <200706071208.04777.rob@landley.net> In-Reply-To: <200706071208.04777.rob@landley.net> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.0 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 Rob Landley wrote: > > Er, make that objcopy, not objdump. > > Sane, maybe not. Something people want to do (and under the mistaken > assumption I know more about initramfs then they do, have asked me how), yes. > It always boils down to "do you have a vmlinux image lying around? Doing > this with a bzImage _is_ brain surgery", and has yet to get beyond that > question. I had about half of a script worked out for this, once... > If it can be done today on a vmlinux then it can be done the same way with the mechanism I have proposed. Period, full stop. > You can also supply an external initramfs image through the initrd mechanism, > but this is unpleasant to do with some bootloaders (or lack of bootloaders). > Plus it doesn't remove the old one, and wasting space makes embedded > developers itch. In thory one could create an extended bzImage format which could handle a concatenated, and easily replaceable, initrd, but if it's done on vmlinux today it would make a *lot* more sense to have it be done on the vmlinux and nothing else. -hpa