RFC ARM: uncompress.h multi-platform enablement

Quoted 13 lines · Arnd Bergmann

Quoted 10 lines · Stephen Warren

From: Stephen Warren <[email protected]>

Tegra's uncompress and debug-macro.S communicate to each-other. Hence, we can't be left without uncompress.h in a multi-platform enabled kernel, or we'll lose features. This series allows uncompress.h to be used in a multi-platform kernel, restores the mvebu uncompress.h, and finally moves the Tegra debug macros into the common location. The series as mainly an RFC due to the outstanding question of where to put Tegra's <mach/iomap.h> in the final patch.

Quoted 4 lines

To follow up on the IRC discussion we had yesterday leading to this patch set, I had another idea of how to handle the same: Since the decompressor code is actually fairly separate from the kernel, we could also build multiple versions of it, and link in the same compressed vmlinux.

That rubbishes the idea of a single kernel though, which is to give distros a single kernel image that they can boot on different ARM platforms.

They want a single kernel binary that works everywhere, not one which they need to select the right binary to work on platform X. Yes, the _internal_ uncompressed bulk may be the same, but it would require distros to carry around N different kernel images for N different platforms.