I have been thinking about the requirement for binutils. Most people
have still been using ``old'' binutils, such as 2.8.1.0.x and
2.9.1. But we have recommened that the users should upgrade their
binutils to a beta version. Although later binutils is definitely
superior to older one because of the better support for 16bits code,
it is never good to depend on any beta release.
So I want to diminish the requirement as soon as possible. There are
at least two possible ways:
1) Support any version of binutils. This means that we must assemble
the 16bits code manually like grub-0.5.
2) Don't use gas for the 16bits code any more. Instead, use nasm or
something appropriate.
The first way must be really a pain, since we must assemble the 16bits
code at hand to produce the real mode machine code. The second way
requires an external program to be installed, but it will not be much
work, because it's much easier to install nasm than to upgrade
binutils safely. Note that binutils is used for system-wide purpose but
not only for GRUB. Any comment is welcome.
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OKUJI Yoshinori <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ^o-o^
http://duff.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~okuji (in English) m /
