Because supporting booting Linux kernel and supporting UEFI runtime service on x86_64 UEFI platform are two separate steps. I decide to push the booting support patches firstly, so that, the essential part of UEFI64 support can go into mainstream kernel firstly.
--- Following sets of patches add EFI/UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) boot support to x86_64 architecture. The EFI runtime service support is not added by the patches. The patches have been tested against 2.6.23-rc2 kernel on Intel platforms with EFI1.10 and UEFI2.0 firmware. With this set of patches applied, the 64bit and 32bit x86 kernel can be booted on x86_64 machine with UEFI64 firmware. Because the EFI memory map is converted to E820 map in bootloader, now the only needed code for booting Linux kernel on x86_64 UEFI platform is the framebuffer driver. UEFI specification can be found here: http://www.uefi.org For booting the UEFI x86_64 enabled kernel, the machine with EFI/UEFI firmware and the support of bootloader is required. Detailed usage guide can be found in Documentation/x86_64/uefi.txt, which is added in the patch: EFI boot document Known issues: - Boot protocol: because the real mode BIOS call can not be used in EFI platform, the standard boot protocol defined in Documentation/i386/boot.txt can not be used by EFI based bootloader. So, a internal boot protocol defined in Documentation/i386/zero-page.txt is used instead. Since this internal boot protocol is also used by many other bootloaders, such as kexec, LinuxBIOS and Gujin etc, maybe it is better to make this internal boot protocol become a public 32bit boot protocol for Linux kernel. - Firmware information, such as ACPI root pointer, smbios pointer, etc. In orignal EFI supporting code, various firmware information is gotten through EFI configuration tables. But, I think the corresponding firmware support code need not depend on the EFI support. So, I think maybe it is a better idea to add these firmware information to 32bit boot protocol proposed previously, and they can be filled by bootloader if available. Looking forward to your comments, Best Regards, Huang Ying - 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/
