Re: EFI and multiboot2 devlopment work for Xen

[Jan Beulich]

>>> On 22.10.13 at 11:45, Ian Campbell <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-10-22 at 10:31 +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> >>> On 22.10.13 at 11:26, Ian Campbell <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > AIUI "efilinux" is somewhat badly named and does not use the Linux Boot
>> > Protocol (i.e. the (b)zImage stuff with real mode entry point) either.
>> > It actually loads and executes the kernel binary as a PE/COFF executable
>> > (the native UEFI binary executable format). xen.efi is a PE/COFF binary
>> > too and could equally well be launched by linuxefi in this way.
>> 
>> Except that unless I'm mistaken "linuxefi" still expects to find certain
>> Linux-specific internal data structures inside the PE image, which I
>> don't see us wanting to be emulating. That's the main difference to
>> "chainloader" afaict.
> 
> Ah, I'd been led to believe it was just the lack of a call to
> ExitBootServices, but I didn't check. What you say sounds completely
> plausible.
> 
> Do you know what sort of Linux specific data structures are we talking
> about?

The setup header I would assume (i.e. the bits surrounding the
"HdrS" signature). But I'm only guessing anyway.

Jan