Re: Suggestion for prekern: warning messages

On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 03:56:29AM +0200, Pierre Pronchery wrote:

> In my tests with QEMU (5.2.0 from pkgsrc 2021Q1 on macOS Catalina
> amd64) no CPU entropy instruction was detected (RDRAND and RDSEED are
> supported). Without an entropy file, I guess it only leaves the time of
> boot in order to guess the seed for KASLR, which is not ideal.

I can't parse that - if RDRAND and RDSEED are supported, why was no
entropy instruction detected?

> Another feature I have in mind is to detect the choice of console and support serial consoles in prekern. I guess it would make it easier to debug.

I'd put it more blunt: missing serial console support makes the whole thing
unusable in many setups.

But I have a (maybe off topic) question (that I did ask Maxime back then
but he evaded answering): why do we have a three phase bootstrap for this
at all? What is it that prekern can do that /boot couldn't? IMHO prekern
should go away and all its functionality moved to the regular bootloader
(or where that does not work the kernel).

Martin