On Wed, 22 Oct 2014, Ralf Baechle wrote: > > Another reason is that the protocol between the bootloader and the kernel > > varies by platform. So you would have to have several different entry > > points, one for each booting protocol. > > > > I am not sure how the bootloaders would know which entry point to use. > > That's where I foresaw the needs for the ISA style platform probe right > at the kernel entry point before fanning out to a platform-specific > entry point. > > Since we already support compressed kernels I'm wondering if relocation > might also be performed by the compression wrapper along with the > hardware probe. That would leave the vmlinux itself untouched and > the wrapper could be installed on the target. Wouldn't it make sense to make a unified kernel virtually mapped? That would avoid the issue with RAM being present at different locations across systems and also if big pages were used, that I believe are available almost universally across the MIPS family, any performance hit would be minimal. There would be hardly any increase in the binary image size too. Run-time mappings such as `kmalloc' or `ioremap' could continue using unmapped segments. Thoughts? Maciej
