[PATCH 1/8] Remove NACA fixed address constraint

Christoph Hellwig hch at lst.de
Tue Aug 9 22:33:47 EST 2005


On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 06:42:42AM +0000, Jeff Scheel wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 05:53, David Gibson wrote:
> > Comments in head.S suggest that the iSeries naca has a fixed address,
> > because tools expect to find it there.  The only tool which appears to
> > access the naca is addRamDisk, but both the in-kernel version and the
> > version used in RHEL and SuSE in fact locate the NACA the same way as
> > the hypervisor does, by following the pointer in the hvReleaseData
> > structure.
> > 
> > Since the requirement for a fixed address seems to be obsolete, this
> > patch removes the naca from head.S and replaces it with a normal C
> > initializer.
> There are IBM internal debug tools built into the iSeries which depend 
> on this address.  Removing it will break them.

Bad luch.  opensource the tools and they can be fixed.  Reliance on
binry only internal to some company tools must not hold kernel
development back.




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