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Currently multiboot2 protocol loads image exactly at address specified in ELF or multiboot2 header. This solution works quite well on legacy BIOS platforms. It is possible because memory regions are placed at predictable addresses (though I was not able to find any spec which says that it is strong requirement, so, it looks that it is just a goodwill of hardware designers). However, EFI platforms are more volatile. Even if required memory regions live at specific addresses then they are sometimes simply not free (e.g. used by boot/runtime services on Dell PowerEdge R820 and OVMF). This means that you are not able to just set up final image destination on build time. You have to provide method to relocate image contents to real load address which is usually different than load address specified in ELF and multiboot2 headers. This patch provides all needed machinery to do self relocation in image code. First of all GRUB2 reads min_addr (min. load addr), max_addr (max. load addr), align (required image alignment), preference (it says which memory regions are preferred by image, e.g. none, low, high) from multiboot_header_tag_relocatable header tag contained in binary (at this stage load addresses from multiboot2 and/or ELF headers are ignored). Later loader tries to fulfill request (not only that one) and if it succeeds then it informs image about real load address via multiboot_tag_load_base_addr tag. At this stage GRUB2 role is finished. Starting from now executable must cope with relocations itself using whole static and dynamic knowledge provided by boot loader. This patch does not provide functionality which could do relocations using ELF relocation data. However, I was asked by Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk and Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko to investigate that thing. It looks that relevant machinery could be added to existing code (including this patch) without huge effort. Additionally, ELF relocation could live in parallel with self relocation provided by this patch. However, during research I realized that first of all we should establish the details how ELF relocatable image should look like and how it should be build. At least to build proper test/example files. So, this patch just provides support for self relocatable images. If ELF file with relocs is loaded then GRUB2 complains loudly and ignores it. Support for such files will be added later. This patch was tested with Xen image which uses that functionality. However, this Xen feature is still under development and new patchset will be released in about 2-3 weeks. Signed-off-by: Daniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Vladimir Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>
This is GRUB 2, the second version of the GRand Unified Bootloader. GRUB 2 is rewritten from scratch to make GNU GRUB cleaner, safer, more robust, more powerful, and more portable. See the file NEWS for a description of recent changes to GRUB 2. See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install the GRUB 2 data and program files. Please visit the official web page of GRUB 2, for more information. The URL is <http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub.html>. More extensive documentation is available in the Info manual, accessible using 'info grub' after building and installing GRUB 2. There are a number of important user-visible differences from the first version of GRUB, now known as GRUB Legacy. For a summary, please see: info grub Introduction 'Changes from GRUB Legacy'