[RFC PATCH 7/8] ARM: vmlinux.lds: Setup physical load address not virtual

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012, Michal Simek wrote:

2012/6/18 Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref]

quoted

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012, Michal Simek wrote:

quoted

Setup correct virtual and physical address in ELF LOAD section.

We are moving to a single kernel binary for multiple targets, including
targets with different physical load addresses.  The kernel code figures
out at run time what the actual physical address is when
CONFIG_ARM_PATCH_PHYS_VIRT is set which is the default these days.  In
other words, we don't know the physical offset at build time in that
case and CONFIG_PHYS_OFFSET is simply not defined.

ok. good to know and nice features. In that case I expect that you are 
using any binary format and you copy it to memory and run it. Code 
find out where it runs and based on that setup things.

Exact.

(BTW: This is very interesting for me to implement it on Microblaze. Can
you point me to that kernel code part? or any doc?)

You could have a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/ARMSingleKernel, 
especially the section "Optimized virt_to_phys() with a runtime 
determined PHYS_OFFSET".

Then the following commits should be of interest:

72a20e22f4 "ARM: P2V: eliminate head.S use of PHYS_OFFSET for !XIP_KERNEL"

dc21af99fa "ARM: P2V: introduce phys_to_virt/virt_to_phys runtime patching"

But can you do it with elf?

No.

Please correct me if I am wrong IRC ARM Qemu uses zImage but it is no
problem to use elf file. For this case
Qemu elf loader also uses physical addresses from ELF and also entry point.

If you want to use the ELF image, then you need to hardcode the physical 
memory location in its header, and that's something we want to get away 
from because it prevents a single kernel binary image from being used on 
different targets with different memory layouts.  Same issue with 
u-Boot's legacy uImage format.

I haven't played with CONFIG_ARM_PATCH_PHYS_VIRT option but what is elf
entry point for this case?

For the kernel image itself it is the kernel virtual address.

For the relocatable zImage decompressor wrapper it is 0.


Nicolas