On 04.04.2013, at 13:53, Andreas Färber wrote: > Am 04.04.2013 11:57, schrieb Artyom Tarasenko: >> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Alexander Graf <ag...@suse.de> wrote: >>> >>> On 04.04.2013, at 11:46, Artyom Tarasenko wrote: >>> >>>> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Fabien Chouteau <chout...@adacore.com> >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On 04/03/2013 06:59 PM, Alexander Graf wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> On 03.04.2013, at 18:40, Fabien Chouteau wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> If we use an ELF kernel there's no need for bios. '-bios -' means no >>>>>>> bios. >>>>>> >>>>>> This sounds like you're actually looking for a way to load an ELF blob >>>>>> as bios using -bios, not a kernel, no? >>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> No, we load the kernel with -kernel, that's what the first patch does. >>>>> But the board is implemented in such way that you can't start without a >>>>> bios. If the -bios switch is not present, then the board uses the >>>>> default bios. This patch allows to start without a bios: >>>>> >>>>> -kernel <PROGRAM> -bios - >>>> >>>> Regardless of the firmware vs. kernel discussion, I think the syntax >>>> may be improved. Under *nix '-' is commonly used for stdin. Would it >>>> be possible to specify /dev/null (under *NIX) or NUL (in the >>>> MS-World)? I think it would make the syntax more explicit. >>> >>> I'd be inclined to say that running -kernel without -bios is simply bogus >>> and shouldn't ever happen. >> >> QEMU does it at least in one other architectures though: leon3_generic. > > Let's rather say: Fabien did it in leon3, too. ;) > > Alex, isn't ARM running without -bios? Instead of a firmware blob it has > some hardcoded firmware'ish instructions in the loader code.
That still means it runs a firmware. It just generates it on the fly instead of loading it from -bios :). X86 used to do the same. > For PReP, Fabien has not stated what his use case actually is (in > particular which hardware?), so it's hard for me to comment on what the > hardware actually does and I thus won't accept random changes just > because they happen to be in Leon3 code. There's nothing conceptually > wrong with loading ELF code so I'm positive we will find a solution to > accommodate all use cases in some way. :) I think it makes a lot of sense to support loading -kernel as an ELF binary. I don't think it's a good idea to allow -kernel without any BIOS. We do that on the e500 machines and so far it's mostly hurt us. Alex