Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 7/8] hw/arm: pass pristine kernel image to guest firmware over fw_cfg

[Alexander Graf]

On 16.12.14 13:18, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 16 December 2014 at 12:15, Alexander Graf <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I don't understand this. On AArch64 I can simply do -kernel Image and it
>> boots without decompressing anything, no?
> 
> Yes, but if you pass -kernel Image.gz then it won't work unless the
> bootloader (ie QEMU) does the decompression for you. AArch64 differs
> from AArch32 here (on 32-bit compressed images have their own builtin
> decompressor; on 64-bit this is made the job of the boot loader).
> We could choose not to support loading compressed images, but that
> would be annoying for users (most other bootloaders do). See
> commit 6f5d3cbe88 where we added this support.

The patch as is assumes that AArch64 images are always gzipped. I don't
think this assumption is correct - if you do "make Image" on a kernel
source tree, you will get an uncompressed Image file.

I think we'd be better off trying to load it as gzip and if it's not
gzipped, fall back to linear load.


Alex