From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Subject: Re: [RFC v2 3/7] firmware: port built-in section to linker table Date: Tue, 3 May 2016 10:08:53 -0700 Message-ID: References: <1455889559-9428-1-git-send-email-mcgrof@kernel.org> <1455889559-9428-4-git-send-email-mcgrof@kernel.org> <1456740770.4666.366.camel@infradead.org> <20160229185606.GD25240@wotan.suse.de> <20160502184106.GA17329@kroah.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20160502184106.GA17329@kroah.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Greg KH Cc: Kees Cook , David Woodhouse , "H. Peter Anvin" , Thomas Gleixner , Ingo Molnar , Borislav Petkov , "x86@kernel.org" , LKML , Andy Lutomirski , Boris Ostrovsky , Rusty Russell , David Vrabel , Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk , Michael Brown , Juergen Gross , Ming Lei , Arnd Bergmann , linux-arch , Russell King - ARM Linux , "benh@kernel.crashing.org" , jbaron@akamai.com, "ananth@in.ibm.com" , anil.s.keshavamurthy@intel.com, David S. M List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 11:41 AM, Greg KH wrote: > On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 11:34:33AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> > On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:12:50AM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote: >> >> On Fri, 2016-02-19 at 05:45 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> >> > This ports built-in firmware to use linker tables, >> >> > this replaces the custom section solution with a >> >> > generic solution. >> >> > >> >> > This also demos the use of the .rodata (SECTION_RO) >> >> > linker tables. >> >> > >> >> > Tested with 0 built-in firmware, 1 and 2 built-in >> >> > firmwares successfully. >> >> >> >> I think we'd do better to rip this support out entirely. It just isn't >> >> needed; firmware can live in an initramfs and don't even need *any* >> >> actual running userspace support to load it from there these days, do >> >> we? >> > >> > I think this is reasonable if and only if we really don't know of anyone >> > out there not able to use initramfs. I'm happy to rip it out. >> >> The changelog for this doesn't say anything about _why_ the change is >> being made? (and what about other architectures.) Also, Chrome OS >> doesn't use an initramfs (and plenty of other things don't too). Being >> able to build monolithic kernels (e.g. Android and Brillo) with >> builtin firmware is very handy. Please don't remove built-in firmware >> support. > > I second this, we can't break existing systems at all. I thought we > were going to keep built-in firmware, right Luis? Removing built-in firmware was simply a suggestion by David which we were evaluating here -- patches were not even yet produced, although I have them now if we wanted to rip it out. Since Kees noted it has users, we'll keep it. Luis