Re: Preliminary kexec support for Linux/m68k

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On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 12:01:30PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
This is a preliminary set of patches to add kexec support for m68k.

Great, this has been a long time coming!

  - Kexec only, no kdump support yet (do you have enough RAM to keep a
    crashdump kernel in memory at all times? ;-)

  - Tested on ARAnyM only. No support for other CPU/MMUs than 68040.

  - Although the code contains some phys/virt conversions, it will probably
    fail miserably on platforms where kernel virtual addresses are different
    from physical address.

  - To have automatic "kexec -e" on reboot, copy /etc/rc6.d/S85kexec from
    another system, and fix it up for kexec living in /usr/local/sbin instead
    of /sbin.

  - Sample invocation:

	kexec -d -l vmlinux --reuse-cmdline


KERNEL:

Patches:
  - [PATCH 1/3] m68k: Add preliminary kexec support
  - [PATCH 2/3] m68k: Add support to export bootinfo in procfs
  - [PATCH 3/3] [RFC] m68k: Add System RAM to /proc/iomem

Notes:
  - The bootinfo is now saved and exported to /proc/bootinfo, so kexec-tools
    can read it and pass it (possibly after modification) to the new kernel.
    This is similar to /proc/atags on ARM.

  - We should create arch/m68k/include/uapi/asm/bootinfo.h (and probably a few
    more, e.g. machine-specific model IDs), as this is needed by both m68kboot
    and kexec-tools.

  - I based [PATCH 3/3] on the PowerPC version, but it's no longer needed as we
    now get this information from the bootinfo.
    Does anyone think this is nice to have anyway?


KEXEC-TOOLS:

Pasting two series in one was a bit confusing for me at first.
Perhaps you could consider posting two separate series in future.

Patches:
  - [PATCH 1/2] kexec: Let slurp_file_len() return the number of bytes
  - [PATCH 2/2] kexec: Add preliminary m68k support

Notes:
  - Based on git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/kernel/kexec/kexec-tools.git

A good choice.

  - Tagged bootinfo is read from /proc/bootinfo by default, but this can be
    overridden using --bootinfo. No bootinfo editor is provided.
    The kexec command will replace/delete command line and ramdisk tags in the
    bootinfo.

This sounds good to me.

  - The ramdisk is loaded at the top of memory minus 4096, unlike with
    m68boot (ataboot/amiboot), as locate_hole() seems to have a bug that it
    cannot reserve a block at the real top of memory.

Is this a bug that could be fixed?

  - The first unused page of the kernel image (at address zero) is
    automatically removed, just like m68kboot does.
    If I don't do this, relocate_new_kernel() fails with a "cannot handle
    kernel paging request at address NULL" exception, although the MMU is
    disabled at that point.
    As m68kboot does this too, I guess this is OK?

It sounds sane to me. But I would appreciate some feedback from
someone familiar with the m68k kernel.

  - Do we want to check the struct bootversion at the start of the kernel,
    like m68kboot does?
    Kexec may be used to load ELF files that are not Linux kernel images,
    and thus don't have a Linux-specific struct bootversion.

If the check can sanely be skipped for non Linux kernel images then
this sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Otherwise I would lean towards
omitting it. Either way, I don't feel strongly about this.


  - Do we want to check the size of the kernel image + bootinfo, and warn the
    user if it's larger than 4 MiB?
    This is a limitation of the current Linux/m68k kernel only.

I think that sounds like a good idea but I don't feel strongly about it.


All comments are welcome!
Have fun! ;-)

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds


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