Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [lkcd-devel] Re: What's left over. | From | (Eric W. Biederman) | Date | 06 Nov 2002 09:13:18 -0700 |
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:
> >From a sanity standpoint, I think the thing already _has_ a system call, > though: clearly "sys_reboot()" is the place to add a case for "reboot into > this image". No? That's where we shut down devices anyway, and it's the > sane place to say "reboot into the kexec image"
When kexec is separated into two pieces I agree. As I had it initially in one step it does not look at all like reboot. Now I just need to think up a new magic number for sys_reboot.
[snip wonderful vision of the theoretical simplicity of sys_kexec].
In case I was not sufficiently clear last night. It could be as simple as your example code if I replaced vmalloc by __get_free_pages/alloc_pages, and allocated a large contiguous area of ram. But MAX_ORDER limits me to 8MB images, and allocating an 8MB chunk is unreliable, and even a 2MB chunk is dangerous.
So I must use some form of scatter/gather list of pages, like area ->pages[] to make it work. Things get tricky because I gather (via memcpy) the pages at a location that potentially overlaps the source pages. So I must walk through the list of pages making certain I when I gather (memcpy) the buffer pages into their final location I will not stomp on a buffer page I have not come to yet. Correctly doing that untangling is where the complexity in kernel/kexec.c comes from.
Eric
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