[coreboot] [PATCH] mkelfImage: set kernel_alignment so 2.6.31+ work

[Troy Telford]

On Thursday, May 20, 2010 03:32:36 pm you wrote:
> 
> Ugh.
> 
> I can think of two things that might be useful.
> 
> 1) Add a print statement into mkelfImage that prints the value of
>    kernel_alignment Most of the fields are already printed so this
>    just requires tweaking linux-i386/convert_params.c
> 
>    Where you still have a reboot in the kexec case I am a little curious
>    if everything applied ok.

I'm more curious, myself, at what happened in the past couple of hours to the 
hard drive...  I've literally done __NOTHING__ to the binary generated, and 
nothing to the script I used (the script removes the old .ebi, uses mkelfImage 
to generate a new one, then kexecs it).

Three hours ago, it behaved exactly as I said.  I moved on to an entirely 
different task, and decided to revisit it after your reply.

Now it is working, and its behavior is consistent between kexec and etherboot.  
I'm a bit WTF'd out about that... but I'll take the victory where I can get 
it.

That being said, the program that calls mkelfImage (which you knew as cwx), 
runs the following command:
mkelfImage --command-line="some stuff here" --kernel=kernelBinary --ramdisk-
base=20971520 --ramdisk=ramDiskPath --output=file

The .ebi files generated are the ones that are returning:

Loading x-slam://10.0.10.1:10006/239.192.0.131:10006 .....(ELF)... done
Firmware type: LinuxBIOS

(and then does nothing)

And that appears to be due to the --ramdisk-base= argument.  Simply increasing 
the size allows the kernel to start - but then fails as it can't load the 
ramdisk.

I'm a bit unclear on what --ramdisk-base actually does; so I'm willing to 
venture that it may be the source of our problem.  I'll see what else I can 
figure out tomorrow.  If you can enlighten me for the purpose of ramdisk-base, 
I'd appreciate it.  (What an initrd load address is/means isn't something I 
know offhand).  I'm going to look that up as well, but for now, I have to call 
it a night.