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Re: Multiboot for amd64?



Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 02:23:26AM +0000, Jonathan A. Kollasch wrote:
At this point, I care very very little about having our
kernel be multiboot.  NetBSD/i386-current GENERIC can't even
mount root without modules being loaded with the kernel.

The multiboot code can specify modules.  If it couldn't, we would be
unable to boot with Xen.

Yes, it can. As you said, the NetBSD boot loader supports it. It is not supported currently on the kernel side (for NetBSD, Xen supports it).

I started working on that, basically by reproducing what happens with the native boot loader (at least what I understand of it), that is:

pre_loc: set eblob to the max end address of the loaded modules (so that the kernel relocates beyound that?).

post_loc: translate the information regarding modules from multiboot to bootinfo data structures.

I did not have time to test it yet...

I'd rather see the "native" boot mode disappear and multiboot become
all we support.  We need mutiboot for xen, so we'd better learn to
live with it.

I second that.

Grégoire


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