• Matt Fleming's avatar
    x86, efi: Handover Protocol · 9ca8f72a
    Matt Fleming authored
    As things currently stand, traditional EFI boot loaders and the EFI
    boot stub are carrying essentially the same initialisation code
    required to setup an EFI machine for booting a kernel. There's really
    no need to have this code in two places and the hope is that, with
    this new protocol, initialisation and booting of the kernel can be
    left solely to the kernel's EFI boot stub. The responsibilities of the
    boot loader then become,
    
       o Loading the kernel image from boot media
    
    File system code still needs to be carried by boot loaders for the
    scenario where the kernel and initrd files reside on a file system
    that the EFI firmware doesn't natively understand, such as ext4, etc.
    
       o Providing a user interface
    
    Boot loaders still need to display any menus/interfaces, for example
    to allow the user to select from a list of kernels.
    
    Bump the boot protocol number because we added the 'handover_offset'
    field to indicate the location of the handover protocol entry point.
    
    Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
    Cc: Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>
    Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMatt Fleming <matt.fleming@intel.com>
    Acked-and-Tested-by: default avatarMatthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1342689828-16815-1-git-send-email-matt@console-pimps.orgSigned-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
    9ca8f72a
head_64.S 8.1 KB