Re: RFC: default CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 08/13/2013 12:02 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-08-13 at 11:52 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> On 08/13/2013 11:43 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
>>> Can we actually boot a 32 bit kernel on an EFI64 system?  The last time
>>> I tried on my Secure Boot SDV it wouldn't work; the problem is getting
>>> someting in the transfer of control path to boot the processor back to
>>> 32 bit mode.
>>
>> We can boot with a bootloader in "skip stub" mode; no runtime services
>> yet.
> 
> So the bootloader has to do the 64->32 transition?
> 
Currently, yes.

>>   We are working on making it possible to boot via a EFI stub in
>> assisted mode (still needing a bootloader, but with the boot stub in the
>> kernel.)
>>
>> Runtime services will be the last piece, obviously, but even that looks
>> reasonably doable.
> 
> So why not start with the working case (default to EFI on 64 bit) and
> add in the mostly non-working case (default to EFI on 32 bit) when it
> actually mostly works?

We can do that, but I really hate making gratuitous differences between
32 and 64 bits... we have too many of those already.

	-hpa