Re: multiboot2: make multiboot header optional

[tgingold]

Quoting Hollis Blanchard <address@hidden>:

> On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 00:41 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > Quoting "Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden>:
> >
> > > On Tuesday 14 November 2006 23:58, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> > > > I would like to make the in-kernel multiboot header optional. If it's
> an
> > > > ELF file, we can load it, even if it doesn't have the header. We can
> > > > also pass the address of the multiboot tags to its entry point (it
> can't
> > > > hurt anything).
> > >
> > > I prefer to keep a multiboot header, because GRUB may not detect an error
> > > that the offset of a multiboot header is beyond 8192 bytes.
> > BTW, on ia64 8192 is too small.  Linux and Xen put the ivt (interrupt
> vector
> > table) at the head of the file because it has the largest alignment
> > requirement (32Kb).  I am not sure there is a big enough hole in the ivt.
> > And Xen has two ivt (-> 64kB).
> > However both Linux and Xen use the ELF format.
>
> Do you have a proposal to solve this problem? Are you advocating
> dropping the multiboot header, since we can load ELF files without it?
I am advocating dropping multiboot header on ia64 *only*.  Basically even if
we implement it, nobody will use it.

Tristan.