James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
> Cool. But so would be getting rid of bzImage in the general case.
> Using a two-stage loader (unless it can be done in 1) to boot a
> vmlinux.gz file from a filesystem would be way cool.
There are a few boot loaders around that understand certain file
systems (GRUB is probably the most popular one), but putting such
functionality into the boot loader doesn't scale well. (See below.)
A much better approach is to, use the Linux kernel as your second stage.
Advantages:
- boot loaders to load that one already exist (although they're
over-featured it this is all they're asked to do)
- you can handle all kinds of exotic things very easily, e.g.
ReiserFS, ext3, XFS, JFS, LVM, RAID, network boot (TFTP, HTTP,
FTP, NFS, HTTPS, you name it), etc.
There's already some fairly advanced work in this direction (bootimg,
Lobos, Monte).
For space-constrained cases (e.g. embedded systems), the existing
comparably lean interfaces between boot loader and kernel should of
course be preserved.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch / /_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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