Hi, I tried booting a few kernels, ranging from 2.2.1 to the current Linus Git, on my IP22s using an ecoff image directly, without the help of arcboot or tip22. It turns out that during many years (at least, since the times of late 2.4 series) the sizes of ecoff images have been so big that ARCS was not capable of reading the kernel images. Therefore, I'd like to claim that it's safe to assume that at least from now on, nobody is ever going to boot ecoffs on IP22 whatsoever, and arcboot and tip22 remain the only way to load Linux on an IP22 machine. I'm leading to the following thing. Currently we have the arch/mips/fw/arc/cmdline.c, which assumes that the kernel could receive command-line parameters directly from PROM, including such variables as OSLoadPartition, OSLoadFilename, etc. Both arcboot and tip22 handle those parameters by themselves, never exposing them to the kernel. The latter fact is easy to see from the sources of the arcboot and tip22 loaders. That said, I would like to simplify arch/mips/fw/arc/cmdline.c::prom_init_cmdline() so that the PROM variables do not get any special treatment. Are you asking me why did I start touching the 13-years-old code? There is an unpleasant bug in the current PROM command line handler. Namely, the CONFIG_CMDLINE, if set, is overwritten when prom_init_cmdline() tries to strip off some of the PROM variables, and it's easy to see from the code of that function. So, I thought of fixing that, and, simultaneously, of simplifying the overall logic by assuming that we never ever have to special-case the PROM variables at all. Could anyone see any drawbacks in the discourse above? If not, I'll start making a patch. Thanks, Dmitri
