Re: [PATCH] add grub-mbchk utility to grub

[Scott Moser]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Robert Millan wrote:

> 2010/8/10, Scott Moser <address@hidden>:
> > Hi all,
> >    I've been playing around with multiboot images, and found grub 0.97's
> > 'mbchk' to be very useful.  Its really nice from a shell script or other
> > to easily answer "is this file a multiboot image?".
> >
> >    The attached patch basically copies mbchk.c from grub-0.97 to current
> > bzr with minimal changes.
> >    Is that something that could be carried in grub2 ?
>
> I think it would make more sense in multiboot itself (multiboot package
> doesn't just include documentation, there's also sample C code and
> such).

Well, I would prefer it in grub, but admittedly, that is for reasons other
than "its the best place for it".  Being part of the grub package means it
would be likely installed on systems and easy to use.  I won't disagree
that 'multiboot' is probably a better place, but will suggest that it is
less discoverable.

Attached is a patch against multiboot-0.6.96 to add a 'tools/' subdir and
'mbchk.c' to that.   The reason for the tools/ dir rather than putting it
into examples was to allow to examples/ dir to continue using '-m32' on
all c files.  I couldn't see an easy way to work around that otherwise.

multiboot-mbchk.patch
Description: add mbchk.c too multiboot