Bug#759018: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] docs: Introduce specification for pv bootloader chainloading paths/formats.

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2014-08-27 at 00:16 +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > It just occurred to me that not every (future) platform may necessarily
> > want this to be ELF, so maybe we shouldn't hardcode that in the
> > architecture-independent part of the name.  If you think this might be a
> > reasonable concern then you might want to adjust this.
> 
> This crossed my mind too (it might even be the case on arm*, not sure
> yet). My thinking was that this spec would already need adjusting for
> this (to describe the non-ELF thing, if nothing else) so this it could
> be tweaked then too.
> 
> Or I could e.g. omit all the vestigial ARM stuff and explicitly list the
> two x86 options, bypassing the whole question of future arches, who
> would then need to add themselves to this doc.

While talking to Colin IRL a couple of nights ago I realised that this
stuff is most likely more specific to x86 PV than I had originally
thought. ARM for example is far more likely to follow the ARM VM spec[0]
and use a UEFI firmware as the stage 1 and the EFI bootprotocol to find
and execute the stage 2 (e.g. grub.efi from the ESP). And who knows what
any future arches might do.

So I intend to update the doc to be less arch agnostic and make it just
cover x86. If some future arch wants something along these lines then
they would have to patch this spec anyway.

Ian.

[0]
http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2014-March/000668.html
> 
> >   Otherwise LGTM.
> > 
> > Reviewed-by: Colin Watson <cjwatson at debian.org>
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
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