Interesting piece of code... Yet another example of showing how to implement an ATA/IDE controller driver :)
Right now I'm pondering whether it is worth implementing a BIOS calls CDROM boot support, or whether I should just go right ahead and do it all with the ATA controller. I'm not sure how IDE controllers work on PPC, since I've unfortunately never used the architecture... Technically, if the ATA/IDE driver is there, implementing the ATAPI command set to "talk" to the CDROM and interpreting the El-Torito spec shouldn't be that hard. If CD-ROM drives are ATAPI on all platforms (where they use ATA), and the ATA code is there, the ATAPI and El Torito layer should stay cross-platform. The interesting bit will be making it so that "plugging in" a SCSI driver will require the least amount of code change. Anyways, I'm kind of rambling for now... Until the official "code start" day I'll do some more reading and investigating how it would be best to tie the code into GRUB2 to give the most elegant solution. Cheers, Alex On 24/04/07, Devils-Hawk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 You should probably have a look at http://www.linuxbios.org/FILO maybe you can salvage something. FILO supports booting from ElTorito bootable CD media, uses 32-bit mode, and it is free of bios calls. Unfortunately its x86 only, although some work has been done to get it running on PPC. regards DevH Alex Roman wrote: > Hello list, > > My name is Alex Roman and I have been selected as a Summer of Code > student for the GRUB2 project. I thought I'd introduce myself and my > project. I am a second year student at the University of Waterloo > (just finished 2A, first term of second year). I have experience > developing in low-level environments in C and assembly. > > Now about my project. I will be adding CD-ROM booting functionality to > GRUB2. The first stage of the project will attempt to use BIOS calls > to achieve this functionality (which is, of course, dependent on the > BIOS's capabilities, standards compliance, etc.). The second stage > will involve writing a complete ATA/ATAPI driver which would bypass > the BIOS completely, thus allowing it to work on virtually any system > out there. > > Unfortunately I only have access to ATAPI CD-ROM drives, so I won't be > able to work on SCSI and/or USB, however I will try to separate the > system to load the boot image from the driver itself as much as > possible so that future driver developments for SCSI and USB will just > be sort of drop-in replacements. > > So, just thought I'd talk a bit about what I'll be doing... > > Thank you for your attention and time. I'm sure I'll have lots of > questions in the months to come. :) > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGLmM6CbmO6P7mspMRCkGqAJ9I6u7BlaiHWjJ1T5qBrwuQ3wyy0QCbBE+Q QsyJ7MVm3zNEfmA8LuVqcGE= =L3H4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
-- Alex Roman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel