Re: [PATCH v1.1 2/3] x86/build: Don't convert boot/{cmdline,head}.bin back to .S

[Andrew Cooper <Andrew.Cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 20/04/2022 13:11, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 14.04.2022 18:27, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>> There's no point wasting time converting binaries back to asm source.  Just
>> use .incbin directly.  Explain in head.S what these binaries are.
> Hmm, yes. Why in the world did we do this all these years?

One of many good questions.  Others include "why the gratuitous
subsell?" and "who's teaching that 'od | tr | awk | sed | sed | sed' is
a clever idea?"  Apparently someone was under the impression that forks
and userspace pipes were free...

>> Also, align the blobs.  While there's very little static data in the blobs,
>> they should have at least 4 byte alignment.  There was previously no guarantee
>> that cmdline_parse_early was aligned, and there is no longer an implicit
>> 4-byte alignment between cmdline_parse_early and reloc caused by the use of
>> .long.
> There's no alignment associated with using .long, so I think you
> want to re-word this.

What I mean is that .long will guarantee to have a 4 byte size, so reloc
used to end up with the same alignment that cmdline_parse_early did (as
far as internal static data is concerned), whereas now it doesn't.

~Andrew