Re: EFI and multiboot2 devlopment work for Xen

From: Ian Campbell
Date: Tue Oct 22 2013 - 05:45:35 EST


On Tue, 2013-10-22 at 10:31 +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >>> On 22.10.13 at 11:26, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > AIUI "efilinux" is somewhat badly named and does not use the Linux Boot
> > Protocol (i.e. the (b)zImage stuff with real mode entry point) either.
> > It actually loads and executes the kernel binary as a PE/COFF executable
> > (the native UEFI binary executable format). xen.efi is a PE/COFF binary
> > too and could equally well be launched by linuxefi in this way.
>
> Except that unless I'm mistaken "linuxefi" still expects to find certain
> Linux-specific internal data structures inside the PE image, which I
> don't see us wanting to be emulating. That's the main difference to
> "chainloader" afaict.

Ah, I'd been led to believe it was just the lack of a call to
ExitBootServices, but I didn't check. What you say sounds completely
plausible.

Do you know what sort of Linux specific data structures are we talking
about?

Ian.

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