[PATCHv3 1/3] x86: use ELF format in compressed images.

Yinghai Lu yhlu.kernel at gmail.com
Sun Apr 6 10:19:28 PDT 2008


On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:38 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> Yinghai Lu wrote:
>
> > so will cost every bzImage extra memory copy? that could be 18M or
> > even more big.
> >
>
>  I wouldn't worry about that.  You will typically have several copies of the
> images during the execution of the boot loader.

i put all drivers needed in kernel.
1. bootloader copy bzImage (6M) to memory
2. arch/x86/boot/compressed/head_32.S, will copy bzImage to end of
buffer to do uncompress on possiton.
3. parse_elf will copy the vmlinux (the uncompressed, that is some big, 18M)

I suggest that could have special elf header, and will only have one
PT_LOAD, and avoid the copy, and just offset start address of
uncompressed kernel for jump later.

YH


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