Re: [Qemu-devel] Allow ARMv7M to be started without a kernel

[Peter Maydell]

On 9 May 2011 16:11, Alexander Graf <address@hidden> wrote:
[about -kernel, unless I've got confused]
> The issue is that this is not how it works on real hardware. Grub won't just
> load a vmlinux file and boot it. I'm not even sure how much exactly the
> early entry code handles in Linux before it jumps to the ELF entry point.
>
> Either way, if you get something rolling that also ensures that it fails
> when it's an ELF file that's not Linux, I'd be very open to it :).

If we do that we need to document what the new way of doing "just load
and jump to the entry point of my not-a-linux-kernel ELF image" is; at
the moment for ARM that use case is supported by -kernel (the code
specifically handles ELF images as not-kernels), so changing that would
be a back-compatibility break...

(maybe this should be '-bios' but that seems a bit of an obscure name.)

-- PMM