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Matt Fleming authored
The EFI handover code only works if the "bitness" of the firmware and the kernel match, i.e. 64-bit firmware and 64-bit kernel - it is not possible to mix the two. This goes against the tradition that a 32-bit kernel can be loaded on a 64-bit BIOS platform without having to do anything special in the boot loader. Linux distributions, for one thing, regularly run only 32-bit kernels on their live media. Despite having only one 'handover_offset' field in the kernel header, EFI boot loaders use two separate entry points to enter the kernel based on the architecture the boot loader was compiled for, (1) 32-bit loader: handover_offset (2) 64-bit loader: handover_offset + 512 Since we already have two entry points, we can leverage them to infer the bitness of the firmware we're running on, without requiring any boot loader modifications, by making (1) and (2) valid entry points for both CONFIG_X86_32 and CONFIG_X86_64 kernels. To be clear, a 32-bit boot loader will always use (1) and a 64-bit boot loader will always use (2). It's just that, if a single kernel image supports (1) and (2) that image can be used with both 32-bit and 64-bit boot loaders, and hence both 32-bit and 64-bit EFI. (1) and (2) must be 512 bytes apart at all times, but that is already part of the boot ABI and we could never change that delta without breaking existing boot loaders anyhow. Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming <matt.fleming@intel.com>
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