[gPXE-devel] [PATCH v3][lkrn] add ramdisk support

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/03/2010 03:38 PM, Michael Brown wrote:
>>
>> As far as I know, GRUB and PXELinux both loads ramdisk to the highest
>> allowed address. For them Shao's code works just OK. (There is still
>> theoretical possibility for umalloc to overwrite ramdisk region, but I
>> don't regard it as practical issue.) I would vote for the simplicity
>> of Shao's patch if I'm sure that all relevant boot loaders are as safe
>> as GRUB. So expecting some experts' viewpoint in this area.
>
> I would expect it to be safe to assume that all bootloaders will load the
> initrd high, but will defer to hpa on this.
>

Grub does this wrong in several cases, loading instead at a fairly low 
address.  Older bootloaders often do, too.  There is always a gap, 
though, otherwise the Linux kernel itself wouldn't boot.

	-hpa