On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 09:19:46AM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote: > On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 05:34:03AM -0800, Eric W. Biederman 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. > > > > ELF is interesting because it is the minimal file format that does > > everything you need. So especially for a proof of concept ELF needs to > > come first. There is an extra virtual address field in the ELF segment > > header but otherwise ELF does not have any unnecessary fields. > > > > ELF is interesting because it is the native kernel file format on all > > architectures linux supports including x86. > > > > ELF is interesting because producing an ELF image in practice requires > > a trivial amount of tooling so it is a good general purpose format to > > support. > > Ok. I will have a look at ELF loader too. I was hoping to keep only one > loader in initial patch. But looks like that's not acceptable. I totally disagree. I think what you have done now is fine. If it works for bzImage, it's a good sense that this is usable as-is. And, if someone else cares about signed elf images, hey, let them implement the loader for it :) Either way, the syscall interface wouldn't change, which is the important thing to get right, so you should be fine for now. thanks, greg k-h
