From: Klaus Reichl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: todo Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 23:43:43 +0200 (CEST) > 1) What is the design goal for GRUB: Either go for BIOS calls to > COMs (may be a pain wrt. BIOS implementations) or go for UART > native HW handling in GRUB (I'm not a specialist on strange UARTs, > but the UARTs I had the last decade was OK, at least from the > portability standpoint - UART 8250 - correct me somebody if I'm > wrong). I'm thinking about using BIOS. That seems easy and small. The benefit from writing device drivers to directly access UARTs would be only that we can get a more speedy connection, I think. > The next assumes that the UART and terminal handling is coded into > GRUB (and not coded via BIOS COM calls). Can BIOS handle a terminal? I don't think that can be done by all the existing BIOSes. > I've some code around which does `qterm' like queries of the > terminal type connected. The question here is what to do after a > certain `TERM' is detected? Linking basic termcap capabilities as > data and a simplistic termcap interpretation library? Fallback is > still to assume CR, LF, and (or not) BS. I'm not sure, but isn't it better for the user to specify his/her terminal capabilities in a configuration file? For example, the user specifies "ANSI", then GRUB can use the ANSI-compliant escape sequences. > What about something like (derived from menu.lst titles): > > 0 My hot operating system > 1 Stable GNU/Something > 2 Or really Win59? > > Select choice? (3 seconds to boot) [0]: > > With BS capability, even that works wrt. the countdown. I thought the same thing. But how should it work if there are too many entries to fit in one screen? However, the worst thing is that we won't be able to share code between the "normal" console and serial console very much. > PS: OKUJI, you mentioned carefulness in Automake checkout in your > latest posting, is there more info (cvs tag or a date string?). No. Get the newest version when you check it out and often run "cvs update". If you just want to compile GRUB, you don't need automake or autoconf. You can set the environment variables such as AUTOMAKE, ACLOCAL, etc. to "./missing automake" or something similar. Thanks, Okuji
