On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 05:36:53PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Fri 2013-02-22 08:00:44, Olof Johansson wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 07:37:10PM -0600, Joel A Fernandes wrote:
Any comments on this approach? Is it better to merge mkfitsrc.sh with mkuboot.sh?
I know this was discussed quite extensively yesterday, but here is my take on it:
Given the recent complications from multiplatform, we really saw a strong reason to _not_ do the final boot wrapping in the kernel build system. Produce the zImage and the DTB files, and have a surrounding script that bundles the two in a format that your particular device needs.
Most distros have scripts to handle the "make install" step of a kernel build. That's where this belongs, not in the actual build step.
Not sure I agree here:
- zImage was designed to boot from floppy, without any kind of
bootloader on i386
zImage on x86 != zImage on ARM.
They only share the fact that they're both compressed and self-extracting.
ARM has never supported any kind of floppy based boot - mainly because floppies have never been "executable" like they are on x86; all that previous boot loaders ever did was load the kernel into RAM using some method and call address 0, with a data structure (formerly struct params, later atags) at a fixed address, later passing that address to the kernel.
The best floppies got was being able to run a script or load an executable off the floppy under the ROM'd OS, and our zImage itself doesn't fit the format required for that.
Our zImage has always been just a pure straight binary compressed kernel format. Nothing more.