Re: [GIT PULL] x86 setup: correct booting on 486 (revised)

Eric W. Biederman
2007-11-06T17:05:56Z

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

> Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> The ELF note format is sane enough, although it looks like it's not
>>> self-terminating, so we'd either need an offset and a length field, or
>>> adopt the convention that namesz = descsz = type = 0 terminates the
>>> block (I prefer the latter, myself.)
>>
>> Hm, I think offset+length would be better: it's how they're represented
>> in a normal ELF file, so you can just extract the length if you're
>> extracting the notes. Also, generating a terminating note with the
>> current linker-based notes machinery would be a bit of a pain.
>
> .notes : {
> *(.note.*)
> . = ALIGN(4);
> LONG(0);
> LONG(0);
> LONG(0);
> }
>
> Am I missing something?

I don't think adding a length any harder.

The all zero note is reserved so using it this way should be ok.
Regardless this sounds like a sane thing to be looking at.

Eric