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

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

>This still ensures the image is loaded to memory, though it will not
>check the extra memory length.  

You can look on this as an opportunity to make ELF images more attractive
than NBI images. If you really want to check that an image is correctly
loaded and that the memory is valid there, then checksum the memory area
after loading and compare it with the checksum in the note section.

I would be happy to see NBI format for Linux images go away but unless
there are telling advantages in favour of ELF, I can't press the suit too
strongly. And I cannot remove tagged image support from the code base
because it provides useful loading of ROM, PXE and DOS images. Things
might have been different if Jamie had used a standard like ELF (I
don't know if ELF was already speced that many years ago) because of
the architecture independence, sane treatment of the byte order issue,
lack of x86isms, support for additional sections, etc. As you can see
from the NBI spec, it was never refined beyond a draft, presumably nobody
had any significant comment to make on it.

This is orthogonal to the issue of zeroing the BSS in ELF segments which
is I agree is a good thing because it's speced that way.