Re: multiboot2: remove "a.out kludge" requirement

[Tristan Gingold]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 01:13:07PM -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 17:55 +0100, Tristan Gingold wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 10:26:54AM +0000, Brano Zarnovican wrote:
> > > On 11/17/06, Andrei E. Warkentin <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >How about having a custom e_type for ELF images booted by GRUB? 
> > > >Something 
> > > >in
> > > 
> > > Guys at Xen solved it nicely with custom ELF section. Somewhere in
> > > your OS code you create a section with specific name, bootloader will
> > > be looking for. For multiboot it might look like:
> > > 
> > > .section __multiboot_v2
> > >        .long MAGIC_THIS
> > >        .long FLAGS_THAT
> > > 
> > But using notes make it almost impossible to use a compressed image.
> > (This is almost a requirement for ia64, but I also think ia64 does not
> > require these flags).
> 
> I don't see how. GRUB must already extract .elf.gz files to read the ELF
> header to load the executable.
Generally the first 1kB (or 2 doesn't really matter) are extracted.  They
should contain the header and the segment table.  Then the remaining is read
in order.
But if a special section (such as .note) must be read before the remaining of
the file, things become more complex.

Tristan.