For a long time arch/mips/Makefile used nm to discover the kernel entry
point by looking for the address of the kernel_entry symbol. This
doesn't work for systems which make use of bit 0 of the PC to reflect
the ISA mode - ie. microMIPS (and MIPS16, but we don't support building
kernels that target MIPS16 anyway).
So for a while with commit 5fc9484f5e ("MIPS: Set ISA bit in entry-y
for microMIPS kernels") we manually modified the last nibble of the
output from nm, which worked but wasn't particularly pretty.
Commit 27c524d174 ("MIPS: Use the entry point from the ELF file
header") then cleaned this up by using objdump to print the ELF entry
point which includes the ISA bit, rather than using nm to print the
address of the kernel_entry symbol which doesn't. That removed the ugly
replacement of the last nibble, but added its own ugliness by needing to
manually sign extend in the 32 bit case.
Unfortunately it has been pointed out that objdump's output is
localised, and therefore grepping for its "start address" output doesn't
work when the user's language settings are such that objdump doesn't
print in English.
We could simply revert commit 27c524d174 ("MIPS: Use the entry point
from the ELF file header") and return to the manual replacement of the
last nibble of entry-y, but it seems that was found sufficiently
unpalatable to avoid. We could attempt to force the language used by
objdump by setting an environment variable such as LC_ALL, but that
seems fragile. Instead we add a small tool named elf-entry which simply
prints out the entry point of the kernel in the format we require.
Signed-off-by: Paul Burton <paul.burton@mips.com>
Reported-by: Philippe Reynes <philippe.reynes@softathome.com>
Tested-by: Philippe Reynes <philippe.reynes@softathome.com>
Fixes: 27c524d174 ("MIPS: Use the entry point from the ELF file header")
Patchwork: https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/patch/20322/
Cc: James Hogan <jhogan@kernel.org>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: linux-mips@linux-mips.org
Paul Burton