[PATCH 0/6] kexec: A new system call to allow in kernel loading

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Vivek Goyal <vgoyal at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Before you are done we need an ELF loader.  bzImage really is very
>> uninteresting.  To the point I am not at all convinced that an in kernel
>> loader should support it.
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> Why ELF case is so interesting. I have not use kexec to boot ELF
> images in years and have not seen others using it too. In fact bzImage
> seems to be the most common kernel image format for x86, most of the distros
> ship and use.
>
> So first I did the loader for the common use case. There is no reason
> that one can't write another loader for ELF images. It just bloats
> the code. Hence I thought that other image loaders can follow slowly. I am
> not sure why do you say that bzImage is uninteresting.

Welcome to the non-x86-centric world ;-)

Looking at kexec-tools, all of arm, cris, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, ppc, ppc64,
s390, sh, and x86_64 support ELF.
Only arm, i386, ppc, ppc64, sh, and x86_64 support zImage.
It's not clear to me what alpha supports (if it supports anything at all?).

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert at linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds