Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 6 Oct 2001 12:00:15 +0200 | From | Erik Mouw <> | Subject | Re: linux-2.4.11-pre4/drivers/mtd/bootldr.c does not compile |
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On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 11:17:32PM +0100, Russell King wrote: > On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 01:48:42PM -0700, Adam J. Richter wrote: > > Attempting to compile linux-2.4.11-pre4/drivers/mtd/bootldr.c > > fails with a bunch of compiler errors, including a complaint that > > "struct tag" is not defined anywhere. Presumably this is the result > > of an incompletely applied patch. > > Firstly, its ARM only. Secondly, Compaq decided that a partition table in > flash isn't a good idea, so they're passing it from the boot loader, which > is a set of tagged lists.
Did you ever get a motivation on why they want to pass it from the boot loader? It sounds like a particularly bad idea to me.
We can't allocate memory in the tagged list parser so you need to have it statically allocated in the kernel. That means that there is a maximum number of partitions, or that we're wasting memory if we don't use all partition table entries. This can of course be (partly) solved by putting the partition table in the __initdata section, but in that case you can't use the partition data if you have the MTD subsystem as modules.
I wonder what was wrong with the previous solution where the kernel just read the partition table directly from flash? If the bootloader can read the partition table, why can't the kernel?
Erik
-- J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/ - 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/
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