On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 11:30:29PM +0300, Dmitri Vorobiev wrote: > >> 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. > > > > Only the very oldest IP22 firmware does not support ELF files. In practice > > those seem to be very rare - I never encountered one - and Linux > > distributions are shipping a 2nd stage bootloader, so there never has > > been much of a need for booting ECOFF, at least not on Indy. > > That is, it's safe to assume that it's either a 32-bit ELF or a 2nd > stage bootloader that gets loaded by the firmware. Yes. The IP22 firmware does not support 64-bit ELF, so 64-bit kernels have to be converted to 32-bit ELF for booting first. The vmlinux.32 target does that. Ralf
