On 4 April 2013 12:53, Andreas Färber <afaer...@suse.de> wrote: > Alex, isn't ARM running without -bios? Instead of a firmware blob it has > some hardcoded firmware'ish instructions in the loader code.
Varies from board to board, but yes, generally we have a trivial bootloader (which on uniprocessor machines doesn't actually run guest code, it just sets registers and memory up to jump to the kernel). > For PReP, Fabien has not stated what his use case actually is (in > particular which hardware?), so it's hard for me to comment on what the > hardware actually does and I thus won't accept random changes just > because they happen to be in Leon3 code. There's nothing conceptually > wrong with loading ELF code so I'm positive we will find a solution to > accommodate all use cases in some way. :) ARM also lets you pass an ELF file to -kernel which it treats as "just pull this blob into RAM and jump to its entrypoint". This is useful for 'bare metal' type test cases (equivalent of dumping a file in over JTAG). The UI is all wrong, though: -kernel should always mean "load a Linux kernel" and we should have some other way (ideally a cross-architecture way) of saying "just load this binary blob and start it". (-bios isn't that because -bios tends to (a) mean different things on different boards and (b) mean 'put this in flash or whatever' rather than 'dump stuff in RAM and go'.) -- PMM
