Re: porting Grub to Xen

[Ferenc Wagner]

"Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 8:45 PM, Ferenc Wagner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Last week we had a very interesting chat on #grub, discussing various
>> possibilities to run Grub in a Xen paravirtual domain.  You showed
>> some interest in properly porting Grub to this architecture instead of
>> my misguided attempts to go through grub-emu and kexec.  You asked for
>> the interface docs to be able to assess the task.  Please find it under
>>
>> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/documentation.html
>>
>> referenced as "Developer Manual" in HTML and PDF.  I put online the
>> current MiniOS source at http://apt.niif.hu/minios.tgz,
>
> Xen is under GPLv2. Unless otherwise stated minios is under GPLv2 too.
> In quick look I haven't found a separate license for minios.

Neither have I, but xen-devel says MiniOS is BSD, and should be
acceptable for Grub.

> Also it's much better in licensing and technical point of view to do
> it from scratch: it usually results in a much cleaner code and it's
> not encumbered by additional clauses

Like I said, realistically I'm rather far from being able to implement
this from scratch.  Unless a low-level expert lays down the
groundwork, I'll have to go back bolting the "kexec" code unto
grub-emu and running that.

Actually, I wonder if Grub could do any better booting paravirtual
domains: you said Grub already knows how to boot Linux, it's even
multiboot compliant, but I'm not sure that really helps much in this
situation, where it has to replace a PV image with another.
-- 
Thanks,
Feri.