Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 4 Feb 2002 16:09:00 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 4 Feb 2002 16:08:40 -0500 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:49676 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 4 Feb 2002 16:08:33 -0500 Message-ID: <3C5EF846.1070501@zytor.com> Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 13:08:22 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Organization: Zytor Communications User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en, sv MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Werner Almesberger CC: "Eric W. Biederman" , "Erik A. Hendriks" , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC] x86 ELF bootable kernels/Linux booting Linux/LinuxBIOS In-Reply-To: <3C58CAE0.4040102@zytor.com> <20020131103516.I26855@lanl.gov> <3C59DB56.2070004@zytor.com> <3C5A5F25.3090101@zytor.com> <3C5ADDD1.6000608@zytor.com> <20020204134927.A5079@almesberger.net> <20020204220234.B5079@almesberger.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Werner Almesberger wrote: > > Well, it keeps things simple for the kernel, and bootimg(8) needs > to know the target architecture anyway. But there isn't really a > design reason why it would have to use pages, agreed. > I looked at this point at some time, and I found that it made it a lot easier to write code to permute memory arbitrarily, as may be required. The reason is that you really want to keep an array that's O(N) in the size of memory to keep track of where things are, and in order to do that, realistically, you need to have some reasonably large granularity -- 4K pages are just about right. Of course, maybe I was just using a dumb algorithm... :) -hpa - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/