On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Kumar Gala wrote:

On Jan 19, 2005, at 9:08 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, David Woodhouse wrote:

quoted

The binary structure which changes every few weeks and which is shared

 > between the bootloader and the kernel? Yeah, "somewhat broken" is one

quoted

way of putting it :)

 >

quoted

The ARM kernel does it a lot better with tag,value pairs.

As does m68k... That's why we never got beyond bootinfo major version 2.

Out of interest, on ARM & m68k I would assume that the list of tag's gets
added to over time?

That's true. But besides the recent conversion of the HP9000/[34]00 code to
use bootinfo, not much has changed during the last 5 years.

If a tag is not recognized, it's just ignored. That means your new feature
cannot be used by the kernel, but it doesn't break the bootloader<->kernel
interface the hard way.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds