stivale.md 2.3 KB
Stivale Support in Easyboot
Not going to happen, never ever. This boot protocol has some very serious bad design choices and it is a huge security risk.
First, stivale kernels have an ELF header, yet somehow you are supposed to know that the header isn't valid; nothing, absolutely nothing implies in the header that it's not a valid SysV ABI kernel. In Multiboot there must be some magic bytes at the beginning of the file so that you can detect the protocol; there's nothing like that in stivale / stivale2. (The anchor doesn't help you, because that may occur anywhere in the file, so actually must search the whole file to be sure it's not stivale compatible.)
Second, it uses sections; which according to the ELF specification (see page 46) are optional and no loader should care about. Loaders use the Execution View and not the Linking View. Implementing section parsing just because of this one protocol is an insane overhead in any loader, where the system resources are usually already scarce.
Third, section headers are located at the end of the file. This means that in order to detect stivale, you must load the beginning of the file, parse ELF headers, then load the end of the file and parse section headers, and then load somewhere from the middle of the file to get the actual tag list. This is the worst possible solution there could be. And again, there's absolutely nothing indicating that a loader should do this, so you must do it for all kernels just to find out the kernel doesn't use stivale. This slows down the detection of all the other boot protocols as well, which is unacceptable.
The tag list is actively polled by the application processors, and the kernel might call into boot loader code any time, meaning you simply cannot reclaim the boot loader's memory otherwise a crash is guaranteed. This goes against Easyboot's philosphy.
The worst part is, the protocol expects boot loaders to inject code into any stivale compatible kernel, which is then executed on the highest priviledge level possible. Yeah, what could go wrong, right?
Because I refuse to give poor quality code out of my hands, there'll be no stivale support in Easyboot. And if you take my advice, no hobby OS developers should ever use it either for their own sake.