From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 6/7] i386: make the bzImage payload an ELF file Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:14:50 -0700 Message-ID: <46682EFA.1020406@zytor.com> References: <20070606225837.654272428@goop.org> <200706062147.21225.rob@landley.net> <46676552.4060308@zytor.com> <200706071208.04777.rob@landley.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200706071208.04777.rob@landley.net> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: virtualization-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org Errors-To: virtualization-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org To: Rob Landley Cc: lkml , v12n , Vivek Goyal , "Eric W. Biederman" List-Id: virtualization@lists.linuxfoundation.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