[PATCH 1/2] x86_64: Reflect the relocatability of the kernel in the ELF header.

[Vivek Goyal]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 05:17:07PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Monday 30 April 2007 17:12:39 Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > 
> > Currently because vmlinux does not reflect that the kernel is relocatable
> > we still have to support CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START.  So this patch adds a small
> > c program to do what we cannot do with a linker script set the elf header
> > type to ET_DYN.
> > 
> > Since last time I have fixed the type to be in my code ET_DYN (oops),
> > and verified this works with kexec.  I realized while testing that we
> > don't have anyway of identifying a kernel vmlinux as linux so we
> > probably want to add an ELF note but that will be another patch.
> 
> The patch is ok for me, but does it pass Vivek's usual testing?

I am facing one issue with this patch. gdb can not analyze the
resulting kernel core file. Looks like gdb treats vmlinux differently if
ELF header type is "ET_DYN". It reads the symbol values incorrectly.

For example, symbol value of "panic_timeout" is 0xffffffff808a1fa8 but
gdb somehow things that it is 0xffffffff008aaebf. Looks like it is
performing some relocation.

I am using GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.5-5.fc6rh).

Thanks
Vivek