Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 15 Jun 2004 06:40:20 +0200 | | From | Sam Ravnborg <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 1/5] kbuild: default kernel image |
| |
On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 10:05:49PM +0100, Russell King wrote: > > I'm slightly scared of this. Historically, there's already pressure > from boot loader people on ARM to include random file formats to suit > their own boot loaders. > > In the first place, ARM had Image and zImage and that was it. It was > well defined. Then people decided that gzipped Image would be nice > and they'd merge the zlib code into their boot loader. I think there's > even some people who use gzipped zImage...! > > Then ARMboot came along and we eventually ended up with uboot-style > wrappings to support uboot / ARMboot, which require an external program > to be installed on the host system called "mkimage" (which, incidentally > is an incredibly bad choice of name.) > > People also came up with the idea of using the ELF file directly and > having the boot loader parse the ELF file. I wouldn't put it past > someone to want gzipped ELF as well. > > There's also srec to support serially downloaded images as well. > > So, in total, we have boot loaders which want: > > - Image > - zImage > - gzipped Image > - gzipped zImage > - uboot > - ELF > - srec > > Basically this is somewhere I don't want to go. My position is that > if boot loaders want to have their own proprietary formats, they > should do whatever manipulation to the kernel image is necessary as > a post processing step themselves from one of the two standard kernel > formats - Image or zImage. > > However, the problem of offering users all these options is that their > first question will be "huh, which one of these 7 do I want?" rather > than everyone knowing that they need the kernel build to produce either > an Image or zImage and the boot loader documentation telling them what > to do with it next.
The advantage is that you now have a good place to document all of these formats - your Kconfig file. And you select the default target for the user.
How did I know uboot required mkimage before - now it can be documented in Kconfig. So the situation above is actually a good example why it is whortwhile to move the kernel image selection to the config stage.
If they all should be part of the kernel build is another discussion.
Sam - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |