Re: load_end == bss_end == -1

[Yuri Zaporogets]

Hello Okuji,

On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 10:04:57PM +0900, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:

> Hmm... So we increase hacks? Oh, this world must be hell.

...at least Unix world.. it is full of daemons, yes ;-)

> Okay, if you stick to the idea so much, I don't object. I'm not very
> concerned about the a.out kludge anyway.

Oh yes, it's very important for my project and for NASM RDOFF tools.
You can't even imagine how ugly was that hack for supporting multiboot
header in the earlier versions of NASM :)

> But it is essential to update the Multiboot Specification precedently,
> because I want to avoid any GRUB-specific extension to the spec, if
> possible. Would you like to work on this?

Sure. My English isn't good, but I want to help keeping the documentation
consistent. So just tell me what I should to do (only update multiboot.texi?)

> On another thing: I don't think it is a good idea to use -1 as invalid
> values. It is 0xffffffff actually, so it must be valid
> certainly. Therefore, I think it would be better to use 0 as invalid
> values instead, because:
> 
> 1. If you wanna load an OS image, (load_end_addr == 0) is
>    nonsense. That makes sense only when (load_addr == 0), but, even in
>    this case, (load_end_addr - load_addr == 0) means that no code is
>    loaded, so this case is also nonsense anyway.
> 2. (bss_end_addr == 0) is nonsense, because, as shown above,
>    load_end_addr must be greater than zero.
> 
> What do you think?

Excellent. I agree about 0. Only 'mbchk.c' needs to be changed a little bit.
New patch is attached.

Thank you again,
73!

-- 
Sincerely,
Yuri.

grub-loadend.patch
Description: Text document