Google Engineers Get Windows Booting When Kexec'ed Under Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Engineers Get Windows Booting When Kexec'ed Under Linux

An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Kexec-Windows-Linux

[S.Pam]

But why?

[RealNC]

But why?

[Guest]

Is google trying to ditch Coreboot for something based on kexec?

[squash]

Is google trying to ditch Coreboot for something based on kexec?

Not quite comparable things. Coreboot is for booting an OS from nothing. kexec is more of a reboot-in-place from a running system. You have to already be running Linux to initiate kexec.

[Jumbotron]

Dual booting with out having to log out and switch to the other OS ??

[Guest]

Not quite comparable things. Coreboot is for booting an OS from nothing. kexec is more of a reboot-in-place from a running system. You have to already be running Linux to initiate kexec.

You could use Linux to create robust firmware or something like that.

It could also be just an attempt to squeeze more out of their servers, they might want to switch over to other operating systems with as little downtime as possible.

[xorbe]

Yeah I don't get the point of this effort. You don't switch from Linux to Windows on a server for "minimum down time" with kexec.

[Old Nobody]

Next month: Google Engineers get Windows 95 starting on top of DRDOS

[sebastianlacuesta]

Excuse if I'm ignorant. Could they be trying to construct something that captures and dumps hardware initialization by Windows? Nvidia encrypted initialization thing?