On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 11:41 AM, Greg KH [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 11:34:33AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:12:50AM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 2016-02-19 at 05:45 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:

quoted

This ports built-in firmware to use linker tables,
this replaces the custom section solution with a
generic solution.

This also demos the use of the .rodata (SECTION_RO)
linker tables.

Tested with 0 built-in firmware, 1 and 2 built-in
firmwares successfully.

I think we'd do better to rip this support out entirely. It just isn't
needed; firmware can live in an initramfs and don't even need *any*
actual running userspace support to load it from there these days, do
we?

I think this is reasonable if and only if we really don't know of anyone
out there not able to use initramfs. I'm happy to rip it out.

The changelog for this doesn't say anything about _why_ the change is
being made? (and what about other architectures.) Also, Chrome OS
doesn't use an initramfs (and plenty of other things don't too). Being
able to build monolithic kernels (e.g. Android and Brillo) with
builtin firmware is very handy. Please don't remove built-in firmware
support.

I second this, we can't break existing systems at all.  I thought we
were going to keep built-in firmware, right Luis?

Removing built-in firmware was simply a suggestion by David which we
were evaluating here -- patches were not even yet produced, although I
have them now if we wanted to rip it out. Since Kees noted it has
users, we'll keep it.

 Luis