Re: Query about changes to GRUB 2 for booting a physical machine using a virtual image

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 03:58:08PM -0400, Swapnesh Chaubal wrote:
> The following entry needs to be added in GRUB2 (according to their website).
> 
> menuentry "VHD Mint 9, Linux 2.6.32-21-generic" {
>       linux (hd0,1)/mint-9/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=/dev/sda1
> vloop=/mint-9/mint-9-gnome-i386.vhd vlooppart=p1 quiet splash
>       initrd (hd0,1)/mint-9/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic
> }
> 
> The thing which has got me perplexed is, how do they manage to make GRUB2
> understand the 'vloop' and 'vlooppart' command?

Those are not GRUB commands; they're parameters to the Linux kernel,
which GRUB just passes through as a string.  (The line-wrapping above
makes me wonder whether you made sure to put "vloop=..." on the same
line as "linux".)

> Is there a way that this can be achieved? (They do have a GRUB module
> called vboot.mod in thier grub folder).

It would be interesting to know what that does; I imagine that it's a
disk driver that causes the virtual disk image to be visible as a disk
in GRUB.  You probably need to invoke it somehow before the menuentry is
executed.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from
http://www.vmlite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=148,
they do not provide source code for their modifications to GRUB; all I
can find is
http://www.vmlite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=175,
which says "Coming soon, you can download our modified open source GRUB2
and VirtualBox source code that VBoot have used."  I don't think that's
good enough since they're distributing the binaries now, and are
therefore bound by the terms of the GNU General Public License.

I will contact them and ask that they remedy this situation.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden