On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 04:47:53PM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > So you need to build a different kernel for some types of MIPS systems? Yes. We can't really do without. Classic MIPS code is not relocatable without the complexity of PIC code as used by ELF DSOs - and their performanc penalty. Plus we have a number of architecture revisions ovr the decades, big and little endian, 32 and 64 bit as the major stumbling stones. There however are groups of similar systems that can share kernel binaries. > Or do you do boot-time rewriting, like a number of other arches do? We don't rewrite the code (as in the .text of the vmlinux binary) but we do runtime code generation for a few highly performance sensitive area of the kernel code such as copy_page() or TLB exception handlers. This allows more flexibility than just inserting templates into the kernel code. Downside - it means we have some of the complexity of as and ld in the kernel. Ralf
