Subject: Re: Questions about 8xxrom

From: Dan Malek <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 12:11:19 -0400

"Brown, David (dbrown03)" wrote:

>
> Now, I've gone back to try the ELF method.  My flash starts at FF800000, and
> the zImage.initrd is stored at the beginning of flash.

As I have said many times, and as recently as yesterday, the zImage
(especially with initrd) was never intended to be a proper ELF image.
It is the most compressed set of bits possible to minimize storage
in a device.  The ELF header is an artifact of the tools used to create
zImage, and should simply be stripped.  The zImage is a "self extracting"
image that is loaded into ram or flash rom.  When you are loading this
from a file system or via TFTP, you know the size to load into memory.
If you are loading from some medium, like a raw flash card, you have
to make some assumptions about the size or tack a few bytes on the front
that indicate the length.  Most systems have some custom boot loader
that requires a special, very small header, or they just jump to the
start of the image in flash rom.

	-- Dan

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