Heads up 2.5.42 does not work with mkelfImage

[Eric W Biederman]

Ronald G Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On 16 Oct 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> > I just did a quick check and the kernels 32bit entry point
> > has changed again.  In particular the segment numbers
> > that are used are different.
> 
> how different? 

The contents of the segment registers are different.  As 2.5.x
currently sits they only way to have a version of mkelfImage
that works for both 2.5.recent and 2.4.x is to explicitly test
the version number.

>Are there a different number of registers, or did they just
> move around?
> 
> Also, doesn't the 32-bit entry point get handled transparently by the ELF
> code?

Yes so no BIOS's need to be rebuilt.  But tools like mkelfImage need
some help.  Hopefully I can get some native support into Linux and
then I can just skip the need to port mkelfImage, to newer kernels.
The feature freeze is on the 20th so I don't know if I will be able to
get anything in or not.

> We have the same problem with plan 9. We're going to need to figure out
> how to parameterize this sooner or later.

Getting support into the kernel proper is they only long term
maintainable way to go.

Eric