[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Eric W. Biederman) writes: > > Since there are people actively investigating things like booting > OpenBSD via kexec things get even worse. Nothing hardly runs > on ia64 so that issue doesn't come up.
If you want to do a popularity contest I expect there are far more ia64 linux users than kexec-of-openbsd users. > As for not using EFI at all. If we can avoid it/not use it in the > dump kernel there is very little point in having it in the primary > kernel. One interesting area is to use it for saving oops data. But that has to be simple. I'm not sure complicated context switches are a good idea here. However I agree it probably doesn't make sense to do virtual mode just for the clock services -- so far we seem to be fine just talking to the hardware directly. > So far there don't seem to be any compelling advantages to running > EFI in virtual address mode and several compelling disadvantages > included having to change the permissions on the kernels memory > map to running EFI in virtual mode. I don't think it's a big issue to have a few less NX bits. Just the original patch for it was ugly. > Please let's stick to a physical mode trampoline and only revisit > the topic when users start having problems because of the performance > hit of going through our trampoline to the EFI runtime services. So you want to switch to new page tables when calling EFI services after boot? Potential problems: - Interrupts have to be disabled. Is that ok? - When EFI BIOS start crashing how do we set up exception handlers for this? I guess it would get complex long term. Also doesn't really sound attractive. -Andi - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
