Re: [Linaro-uefi] [PATCH] xen: arm: implement generic multiboot compatibility strings (Was: Re: The GRUB multiboot support patch for aarch64(V3.1))

[Julien Grall <julien.grall@linaro.org>]

On 06/05/2014 07:31 PM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-06-05 at 18:03 +0100, Julien Grall wrote:
>>>> While we are modifying the protocol, "linux-zImage" is confusing in the
>>>> name. Actually we can use it for an ELF, another OS... I don't think Xen
>>>> will change his behavior depending of the DOM0 image.
> 
> Actually thinking about this some more I think you are right. Xen
> already probes the kernel it gets so we can safely implement this as
> multiboot,kernel, since we don't really need the more specific type. If
> in the future some non-probable kernel comes along which we want to
> support we still have the option of adding more specific compatibility
> strings.
> 
> Fu Wei -- if this is OK with you I will modify the wiki page to
> s/multiboot,linux-zimage/multiboot,kernel/ and rev this patch to suit.
> 
> Can we do something similar with linux-ramdisk? I'm not sure since we
> cannot easily probe the ramdisk contents. We could base the ramdisk
> behaviour on the probed behaviour of the kernel. Anyone got any
> thoughts?

I have only check FreeBSD, and they don't have any bindings for the
ramdisk for now. It seems they use the command line for this purpose.

Probing the ramdisk won't help here because the magic and the underlying
filesystem might be the same.

I was about to say, we should do add a "multiboot,ramdisk" (or another
name) but we have to add the linux,initrd-* foo in the device tree.

In another hand keeping the actual properties with properties from
another ramdisk protocol won't harm here. Each kernel will deal with the
property it would like to use.

Regards,

-- 
Julien Grall