Stefan Reinauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Hi,
> * Svante Signell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [051229 17:12]: >> I'm currently reading the mailing list archives on GRUB V2 and LinuxBIOS >> development. Can somebody please enlighten me on the interfaces between >> the two development projects. > > I've only been marginally following grub2 development, but the short > answer is: There are no interfaces at all at the moment. The somewhat > longer answer is: From the LinuxBIOS perspective, this is not a bad > thing, as LinuxBIOS tries to keep it's interfaces as small as possible. > There are only two "transitions" between LinuxBIOS and a "client": > > 1) LinuxBIOS comes with an ELF loader that can load any static self > contained ELF binary from flash and execute it. This means a single > binary containing all grub parts that are needed to boot an OS > could be packed together with LinuxBIOS and burned to flash. So > far: in theory. In that case it would be easy to create a GRUB 2 binary which can be loaded from LinuxBIOS. There are similar binaries to load GRUB 2 using PXE or Multiboot (from GRUB Legacy, for example) already. I assume it is little work to implement this. > 2) There is a mechanism to pass information from LinuxBIOS to the > outside world called the "LinuxBIOS table". This table contains > internal information about the BIOS, such as the possible CMOS > settings, the RAM map of the machine, etc (there's also E820, > PIRQ, MPTABLE and ACPI). > > NOTE: LinuxBIOS does not provide any "legacy bios interrupt callbacks", > so no client can call back into the bios to load stuff from the hard > disk. This means a client has to provide a driver for this that accesses > the hardware, not the BIOS. This is why I wrote "in theory" above. It's possible to add drivers to GRUB 2. At the moment there are no drivers there yet, but it surely is possible without too much effort. > I have been working on taking the grub1 frontend and packing it into FILO > a while ago. So you can use a grub user interface easily with LinuxBIOS > already (with a reduced function set. patches welcome) It would be nice to have a GRUB 2 payload as well. I plan to add drivers in the long term, it's required for several ports. So it fits well within the design and direction of the GRUB 2 project, IMO. >> Is anything tutorial-like written explaining the different >> functionality of the (Linux)BIOS (CPU, memory, peripheral >> initialisation, etc) and GRUB (kernel loading, transfer of control >> to kernel etc). GRUB 2 has loaders, you can find them in loaders/. For every OS a separate loader is required. I think the sourcecode is quite easy to understand, but feel free to ask any question you have regarding the code and its design. -- Marco _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
