Can we get rid of zImage this time?

Can we get rid of zImage this time?

[H. Peter Anvin]

I brought this up a few years ago, and had it shot down, because of a
few poorly substantiated claims of zImage-only machines; those claims
really need to be debugged since they might indicate A20-related failures.

Anyway...

Can we please kill zImage?  In addition to be completely useless for
modern kernels, it causes unnecessary complexity in boot loaders.

	-hpa

Re: Can we get rid of zImage this time?

[Bruce Ashfield]

On 6/11/07, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
> I brought this up a few years ago, and had it shot down, because of a
> few poorly substantiated claims of zImage-only machines; those claims
> really need to be debugged since they might indicate A20-related failures.

These beasts are still alive and kicking. I boot a handful of
arm and ppc boards on a frequent basis that are zImage
only.  The kicker is I don't have the bootloader source for
most of them, so changing to a different image format is
tough at best.

Not a vote one way or the other, just some observations
from my day to day.

Bruce


>
> Anyway...
>
> Can we please kill zImage?  In addition to be completely useless for
> modern kernels, it causes unnecessary complexity in boot loaders.
>
>         -hpa
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Re: Can we get rid of zImage this time?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Bruce Ashfield wrote:
> 
> These beasts are still alive and kicking. I boot a handful of
> arm and ppc boards on a frequent basis that are zImage
> only.  The kicker is I don't have the bootloader source for
> most of them, so changing to a different image format is
> tough at best.
> 

Sorry, the zImage/bzImage distinction is x86 only.  Some other
architectures call their output zImage, but it's a different format
entirely.

So I was referring specifically to x86.

	-hpa

Re: Can we get rid of zImage this time?

[Bruce Ashfield]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Bruce Ashfield wrote:
>> These beasts are still alive and kicking. I boot a handful of
>> arm and ppc boards on a frequent basis that are zImage
>> only.  The kicker is I don't have the bootloader source for
>> most of them, so changing to a different image format is
>> tough at best.
>>
> 
> Sorry, the zImage/bzImage distinction is x86 only.  Some other
> architectures call their output zImage, but it's a different format
> entirely.
> 
> So I was referring specifically to x86.

Ah my mistake, I quickly scanned and didn't pick
up the x86 reference. Nothing to see here :)

Bruce

> 
> 	-hpa

Re: Can we get rid of zImage this time?

[Krzysztof Halasa]

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> writes:

> Can we please kill zImage?  In addition to be completely useless for
> modern kernels, it causes unnecessary complexity in boot loaders.

I hope so.

BTW: I'd just kill old zImage and make it identical to bzImage
(I mean "make zImage" would now produce arch/i386/zImage identical
to arch/i386/bzImage made by "make bzImage").

Then we could use zImage as for other platforms.
-- 
Krzysztof Halasa