Soliciting opinions on an extension of the bootinfo structure

[Andrew Duane]

That's correct. This is actually part of a larger effort to open up the MIPS code to a range of new bootstraps. Some bootstraps use the bootinfo facility extensively. It's an easy way to pass some simple information to the kernel without the clutter of metadata and other such things.

 ...................................
Andrew Duane
Juniper Networks
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aduane at juniper.net

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Wemm [mailto:peter at wemm.org] 
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 6:48 PM
To: Peter Grehan
Cc: Andrew Duane; freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org; freebsd-arch at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Soliciting opinions on an extension of the bootinfo structure

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Peter Grehan <grehan at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> I'm proposing an extension framework for the bootinfo structure used
>> to pass information from the bootstrap/loader to the kernel. Although
>> I'm only proposing this for the MIPS bootinfo, it's completely
>> applicable to any of them.
>>
>> What I propose is adding an optional platform extension structure:
>> bootinfo_pext, surrounded by #ifdef BOOTINFO_PEXT
>
>  Any reason not to put the vendor bits into another piece of loader metadata
> ? That seems the extensible way to add additional info from the loader,
> rather than extending bootinfo (as was the case pre-loader days).
>
> later,

It sounds like they're not using loader, which is probably a
reasonable thing for their environment.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
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