H. Peter Anvin wrote:
No, not at all.
I'm proposing that the existing bzImage format be retained, but that the
payload of the decompressor (already a gzip file) simply be vmlinux.gz
-- i.e. a gzip compressed ELF file, notes and all. A pointer in the
header will point to the offset of the payload (this is new, obviously.)
The decompression stub is adjusted to expect an ELF image, instead of a
raw binary.
Existing bootloaders (16- or 32-bit) simply load the bzImage the way
they do now; new bootloaders have the option of accessing the vmlinux.gz
directly if they either want to load it themselves or want to examine
the notes.
Slight correction: it does, of course, break loaders which root through
the bzImage for a gzip header and decode that themselves and place in
memory. These loaders are pretty broken, though; they can't deal with
the fact that the physical address of the kernel is configurable, for
one thing.
-hpa
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