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Re: GRUB vs LinuxBIOS question
From: |
Marco Gerards |
Subject: |
Re: GRUB vs LinuxBIOS question |
Date: |
Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:32:48 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
Stefan Reinauer <address@hidden> writes:
Hi,
> * Svante Signell <address@hidden> [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