Re: [RFC 1/1] add support of `--initrd` for ELF-ARM kernels

[Peter Maydell]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2023 at 08:35, Stefan Lankes
<slankes@eonerc.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
>
> Currently, the flag `--initrd` is only support for Linux ARM kernels.
> However, also other ELF kernels could depend on an initial ramdisk.
> This PR loads also the initrd for ELF kernels and announce the
> location by the nodes "/chosen/initrd-start" and
> "/chosen/initrd-end" within the device tree.

What are these "other ELF kernels" ? Is there some defined
specification of bootloader you're trying to implement here?

Currently QEMU for Arm supports two things:
 (1) I am a Linux kernel, load me like the Linux kernel defines
 (2) I'm just a bare-metal image (ELF file or raw)

Adding support for some third type of loading would need a
pretty solid justification, eg that this is a very common kind
of image to load, that there is a well defined specification,
that it's supported by lots of other bootloaders, etc.
The bootloading code is too complicated already and I am
very reluctant to add more to it.

thanks
-- PMM