On Monday 10 September 2012, Catalin Marinas wrote:

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 06:53:39AM +0100, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD wrote:

quoted

On 19:29 Sun 09 Sep     , Nicolas Pitre wrote:

quoted

On Sun, 9 Sep 2012, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD wrote:

quoted

On 17:26 Fri 07 Sep     , Catalin Marinas wrote:

quoted

+The image must be placed at the specified offset (currently 0x80000)
+from the start of the system RAM and called there. The start of the
+system RAM must be aligned to 2MB.

can we drop this

Drop what?
And why?

This contrain the must be loadable at any address

You can't easily load the kernel image at any address, unless it can
relocate itself and you have a way to specify PHYS_OFFSET. We don't want
a compile-time PHYS_OFFSET, the kernel detects it at boot time based on
the load address.

I think a bunch of other architectures can have relocatable kernels, which
is useful e.g. for kdump. It does imply a small runtime cost and may have
other disadvantages though.

	Arnd