RE: [Xen-devel] RFC/Patch: Support for other bootloaders

[Michal Ostrowski <mostrows@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As far as I can tell, Tim's solution was developed under the constraint
that Xen support only multi-boot format arguments.   If either solution
is adopted, then Xen will effectively support both the multi-boot
parameter format and the Linux boot_params format.  The major
distinction then is whether or not Xen will support boot_params by
converting it into multi-boot format in assembly, or whether boot_params
arguments will be processed in C code.

It is my opinion that it is preferable to have C code in place of
assembly code for such tasks.


That issue aside, here are my thoughts on some of the other issues in
this space:

1.  Xen command-line arguments should come from the boot-loader at boot
time, not hard-coded into a boot image.

2.  dom0 command-line arguments are appended to Xen command-line
arguments, separated by  "---"  (Linux command-line parsing allows for
"--").

3.  Using a ramdisk with dom0 requires that Linux be able to package a
ramdisk within itself or that Xen at some level supports some form of a
ram-disk format that allows multiple images to be packed into one
module.   I think it might be feasible to get Linux to support the
former.



PS:  mbootpack did not work on my system.  It printed:

mbootpack v0.1 (alpha)

and then nothing else happened.

Of course, I'm now curious as to whether or not my solution works in
Tim's environment.


-- 
Michal Ostrowski <mostrows@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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