Re: [PATCH] generic ELF loading

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Tuesday 24 October 2006 22:03, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> Actually I'm not using the heap, I'm just directly copying wherever
> phdr->p_paddr says to. That's not a good thing actually; in the future
> we should add some error checking to make sure we don't clobber GRUB
> itself.

OK, then it's even worse. :(

You must not assume that GRUB can always load an OS image to an appropriate 
location directly. I know this is the case for the current implementation of  
the Multiboot loader, but it is a very bad idea, generally speaking.

What GRUB should do is first to load an image to somewhere then relocate it to 
the right place at boot time. On i386-pc, the OS area is used for this very 
purpose. The x86 Multiboot loader is just a mistake, and that's why we must 
rewrite it.

Okuji