[OLPC-devel] Rainy-day task: Add kexec to busybox

[Jordan Crouse]

Greetings - 

As you may know, we use kexec (http://www.xmission.com/~ebiederm/files/kexec/)
as part of our scheme for booting the OLPC board with the LinuxBIOS ROM.  
It has been suggested recently that we might gain some precious bytes by 
adding kexec to busybox (http://busybox.net) rather then using it in its 
original form from kexec-tools.

So I thought I would send out a request to the mailing list to see if we
could find anybody interested in joining us and giving us a hand by porting
kexec to a busybox applet.

The requirements are easy - we use kexec to boot a bzImage and initrd from 
the storage media (USB or flash) and we want that available as a busybox
applet instead of a standalone binary.  To begin with, we would only need 
support in kexec for x86-32 and bzImage, though I'm sure people on other 
architectures would enjoy having their support in there eventually.

Currently, kexec takes up 19440 bytes (compiled with uclibc as a shared
library and stripped), so the delta of size in the busybox binary would
need to be less then that (obviously).

If anybody is interested, please let us know. 

Thanks,
Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Senior Linux Engineer
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
<www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>