Continuing the 'remove ELF' patch series.

These changes extend the larchive structure, and 
add a Kconfig EXPERT option to enable the 'no elf' mode.

Signed-off-by: Ronald G. Minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net>


git-svn-id: svn://coreboot.org/repository/LinuxBIOSv3@483 f3766cd6-281f-0410-b1cd-43a5c92072e9

1 files changed, 19 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Kconfig b/Kconfig
index a5bfaf7d3a01..abaaa8c5fe14 100644
--- a/Kconfig
+++ b/Kconfig
@@ -53,6 +53,25 @@ config LOCALVERSION
 	help
 	  Append an extra string to the end of the LinuxBIOS version.
 
+config NOELF
+	bool "Don't use ELF for payloads"
+	depends EXPERT
+	default n
+	help
+	  Until now, LinuxBIOS has used elf for the payload. There are many problems 
+	  this, not least being the inefficiency -- the ELF has to be decompressed to
+	  memory and then the segments have to be copied. Plus, lar can't see the segments 
+	  in the elf -- to see all segments, you have to extract the elf and run readelf on it.
+	  There are problems with collisions of the decompressed ELF location in memory
+	  and the segment locations in memory. 
+	  Finally, validation of the ELF is done at run time, once you have flashed the 
+	  FLASH and rebooted the machine. Boot time is really not the time you want to find 
+	  out your ELF payload is broken. 
+	  With this option, LinuxBIOS will direct lar to break each elf segment into a LAR 
+	  entry. ELF will not be used at all. Note that (for now) LinuxBIOS is backward
+	  compatible -- if you put an ELF payload in, LinuxBIOS can still parse it. We hope
+	  to remove ELF entirely in the future. 
+
 config BEEPS
 	bool "Enable beeps upon certain LinuxBIOS events"
 	depends EXPERT