[RFC PATCH 0/4] Add support for LZ4-compressed kernels

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> On 01/30/2013 10:33 AM, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> >>
> >> The only concern I have with that is if someone paints themselves into a
> >> corner and absolutely wants, say, LZO.
> > 
> > That would be hard to justify given that the kernel provides its own 
> > decompressor code, making the compression format transparent to 
> > bootloaders, etc.  And no one should be poking into the compressed 
> > zImage.
> > 
> 
> Some utterly weird things like the Xen domain builder do that, because
> they have to.  That is why we explicitly document that the payload is
> ELF and how to access it in the bzImage spec.

Are you kidding?

And what format do they expect?

If people are doing weird things with formats we're about to remove then 
it's their fault if they didn't make upstream developers aware of it.  
And if the reason they didn't tell anyone is because it is too nasty for 
public confession then they simply deserve to be broken and come up with 
a more sustainable solution.


Nicolas