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

Jiri Kosina jkosina at suse.cz
Fri Nov 22 08:30:17 EST 2013


On Fri, 22 Nov 2013, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

> > 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?).

OTOH, does this feature make any sense whatsover on architectures that 
don't support secure boot anyway?

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs




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