Re: [Etherboot-developers] [COMMIT] 5.1.2+ boot from disk.

[<ke...@us...>]

>The final issue is how to handle unitialized areas of an image, the
>bss parts of a segment.  For ELF it is required that they be zeroed,
>and the zeroing is cheap and it increases reproducibility of behavior.
>For tagged images we do all of the zeroing before we load anything to
>ram so the zeroing it will not cause problems.  If it is felt that the
>zeroing is a problem or that the unitialized memory length check is
>a problem we can simply not pass that information to prep_segment.

As I said what do do with the gap between the image length and the memory
length wasn't considered in the NBI spec. You are placing an
interpretation on it that wasn't in its design. I may simply make them
the same in future versions of mknbi, but Etherboot has to work with
existing NBI images which are compliant. If you feel that strongly about
zeroing RAM for NBI you can make it a compile option. If a loaded program
depends on undefined areas being zero, I consider that a bug and zeroing
it masks the bug.