On 18:01 Tue 21 Jun , Olivier Martin wrote:

Thanks Grant for adding me to the list, To introduce myself, I am part of the UEFI team at ARM Ltd. I am also the maintainer of the ARM Packages in the Open Source implementation of UEFI (http://www.tianocore.org/ ).

Maybe an issue this "ARM Boot Architecture" topic should solve is the interface between the boot loader and the Linux kernel binary.

Recently, I was trying to extend our ARM UEFI boot loader to detect the type of the Linux kernel binary:

• zImage, non-compressed Image, uImage format
• ATAG or FDT support

... to start any kernel by passing the correct parameters and jump to the right offset.

Unfortunately, it was not as easy as it should be. In fact it does not look to be possible right now. Defining a signature (eg: kernel binary format + machine type) in the kernel binary would make the task easier. Some of the formats have a signature (eg: u-boot) but not all the formats.

Actually, if we try to boot a Linux kernel with the wrong settings then the kernel would crash or raise an error. And it is not be possible to recover from this state without restarting the platform. Making these information available to the boot loader (u-boot, uefi, etc) would also make easier the migration from the legacy ATAG to the Flat Device Tree (FDT) support.

in Barebox we use the same as u-boot but we can boot a zImage directly

BTW, Thursday 15:00UTC is fine for me.

15:00UTC is a bit late for I as I live now in China Shanghai

I'd prefer 14:00UTC as if the call take 2h it will be already midnight here

Best Regards, J.