[PATCH 0/5] Relocatable 64-bit kernel using linker PIE support

[Kumar Gala]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:12 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 11:27 +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
>> The following series of patches implement support for a relocatable
>> kernel by building it as a position-independent executable (PIE).
>> When the linker is given the -pie flag, it creates an executable that
>> contains dynamic relocations which can be used to relocate the image
>> at boot time for any desired base address.  This patch series adds a
>> CONFIG_RELOCATABLE config option for 64-bit which links the kernel
>> with -pie and arranges to process the relocations in early boot.
>>
>> With the first 4 patches applied, a relocatable kernel will still  
>> copy
>> itself down to real address 0.  The last patch changes things so that
>> a relocatable kernel will run wherever it was loaded.  This last  
>> patch
>> is pretty much just a proof of concept since it doesn't do anything  
>> to
>> ensure appropriate alignment of the base address (the base address
>> needs to be 16kB aligned).  We probably want to work out whether we
>> are a kdump kernel and run in-place if so, or copy down to 0 if not.
>
> Is this mature enough for us to consider putting it in Fedora? We'd
> _love_ to stop building a separate kdump kernel for ppc64...

Also, can we get this on ppc32 (head_32.S)?

- k