I just talked to Brett Johnson, the maintainer for elilo.
My suggestion of having initrd= and module= be synonyms
doesn't work well with the elilo parser. However,
he prefers a solution that AFAIK has not yet been proposed:
- Leave image= for the Linux kernel image.
- Leave initrd= for the Linux kernel's initrd
- Add a NEW keyword, xenimage=, to specify the xen binary.
He says that the module= proposal is already Xen-specific;
he doesn't see any other uses for it on the horizon. The
term "module" is also very vague and doesn't describe what
it is being used for. So, he says, why not just be explicit
that we are booting Xen and leave the image= and initrd=
keywords with the same Linux meaning. Thus:
label=xen
xenimage=xen
image=xenlinux
initrd=initrd.img
(and if we don't want to explicitly encode the term "Xen"
in the keyword, we could use "hvimage=" or "hv=" or
"hypervisor="** instead.)
Brett's solution seems the best to me. It will also
work quite nicely for a transparently paravirtualized
system: If xenimage= is specified but the file is not
found, just load and boot image= which will boot normal
Linux.
Comments?
On a related note: Anthony, Brett said that he would much
prefer to see a patch against elilo v3.5-pre1 as there are
additional bug fixes in that base.
Dan
** probably don't want to use "hypervisor=" since the
word has been trademarked by a certain big blue company :-)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Yang, Fred [mailto:fred.yang@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 10:45 AM
> To: Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins); Xu, Anthony
> Cc: xen-ia64-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [Xen-ia64-devel] PLEASE REPLY and RE: [PATCH]
> Patch for loading module[2of2]
>
> Backward compability issue is only happened on "deployed"
> product, not the "in development" project as xen/ia64.
> Why need so much "options"?
>
>
> Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins) wrote:
> > Well, so far the community is overwhelmingly in favor of B...
> >
> > Which is OK with me. I've come around to being OK with this
> > after thinking on it overnight. I was uncomfortable with
> > losing the backward compatibility, but if this is going
> > to happen, now is the best time to do that while Xen/ia64
> > has few users.
> >
> > One other thought I had overnight though:
> >
> > Both the domain0 image and the initrd image could be
> > considered parameters to Xen. So suppose that "initrd="
> > and "module=" are simply aliases for each other and the
> > first two files specified as either module or initrd
> > are passed (in order) as parameters to Xen. This would
> > not only be backwards-compatible with existing Xen elilo.conf
> > files, but would be more compatible with grub. So
> > all of the following do the right thing:
> >
> > # choice A
> > image=xen
> > initrd=xenlinux # backward compatible
> > #no initrd
> >
> > # choice B
> > image=xen
> > module=xenlinux
> > initrd=initrd.img
> >
> > # grub and Xen/x86 compatible
> > image=xen
> > module=xenlinux
> > #no initrd
> >
> > # grub and Xen/x86 compatible and probably
> > # the best to document for Xen/ia64?
> > image=xen
> > module=xenlinux
> > module=initrd.img
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Xu, Anthony [mailto:anthony.xu@xxxxxxxxx]
> >> Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 10:19 PM
> >> To: Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins); Yang, Fred
> >> Cc: xen-ia64-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >> Subject: RE: [PATCH] Patch for loading module[2of2]
> >>
> >>>> Elilo is a gerernal OS loader,it doesn't and doesn't need to know
> >>>> presence of domain0, For elilo, xen.gz is a OS kernel, initrd=
> >>>> it's Os's initial ramdisk, module= is Os's parameter, we should
> >>>> keep all this meaning, we shouldn't make elilo special just for
> >>>> xen.
> >>>
> >>> Yes, module= is OS's parameter, but domain0 is not
> >>> really a parameter.
> >> From the view of Elilo, xen is an OS, domain0 is a
> parameter to xen.
> >> As far as how to handle this parameter, it's up to xen.
>
>
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