Re: IA64 port

[Robert Millan]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 01:56:49PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> Quoting Robert Millan <address@hidden>:
> 
> > On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 11:35:26AM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > > Quoting Robert Millan <address@hidden>:
> > > > > > Why is this needed?  I'm not sure if it's good to exploit this
> > > > "unreliability"
> > > > > > feature that fat provides us ;-)
> > > > >
> > > > > On EFI, the prefix is extracted from an EFI path, whose case may not
> > match
> > > > > the FAT entries.
> > > >
> > > > Can you be more specific about this?  What do the specs say?  We wrote
> > > > /boot/grub ourselves via grub-install;  is an EFI-compliant firmware
> > > > allowed to actively mess up case in paths we provided?
> > >
> > > On EFI, we don't really know where grub is stored.  There is a filesystem
> > > layout convention we'd better to follow.  As a consequence, we extract the
> > > path from an EFI structure (I didn't write this code - it's in the EFI
> > common
> > > code).
> >
> > What would you think of case-insensitive search in grub_efi_set_prefix() ?
> 
> You mean walking the filesystem in grub_efi_set_prefix ?  Humm, this looks
> like a hack.

It does, I admit ;-).  From my POV, it's a workaround for a bug, and it's not
so strange that workarounds tend to look like ugly hacks.

Anyway, does EFI replace the string with a case-unsensitive equivalent in
practise?

> The filesystem may not be FAT and there may be no way to read
> directory entries (eg tftp - even if not yet supported).

You can still do this kind of search by stating for a lot of specific files
instead of iterating.  This would be a PITA, though :-(

> If you really don't like it I can put it away for now.  Grub should work
> without this patch in most cases.

Could you wait untill the maintainers have their say on this?  If Marco or
Okuji think it is fine, I have no objection then.

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)