Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@...>, Andres Salomon <dilinger@...>, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@...>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, Joseph Fannin <jfannin@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, <jordan.crouse@...>
The 0x800000 ramdisk load address is an OLPC-specific firmware
implementation detail that could easily be changed without affecting
anything else. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because it isn't
really an integral part of the interface "contract".
I certainly hope that the OLPC kernel never gets anywhere near that
size. The OLPC hardware has limited configurability, so it's not
plausible that the kernel would grow that large to include a huge kit of
drivers. If the kernel file becomes large as a result of including the
initramfs in the same file, the 0x800000 ramdisk load address won't
apply (because there won't be a separate load of the initramfs file), so
the kernel could be extend way past that boundary with no problems.
If we get to the point where we do need huge kernels on OLPC, we can
release a firmware upgrade along with the new OS. We have mechanisms
for coordinating firmware and OS upgrades.
If a new customer for OFW on x86 appears, I'll remember to float the
boundary above the bzImage uncompressed size (assuming that the bzimage
format is still applicable when that happens).
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