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

[Vivek Goyal]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 02:30:17PM +0100, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> 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?

I guess if signed modules makes sense, then being able to kexec signed
kernel images should make sense too, in general.

Thanks
Vivek