Re: How does install-grub work?

[David Craven]

>>So for booting a vm we don't actually need a boot loader, since it passes the 
>>kernel image through the -kernel flag.
>
> Huh, that appears to be the case. Back when I used VMs the first time they 
> simulated the entire PC, BIOS and all and there you would need the partition 
> table, bootloader etc just as you would on a real PC. But it seems to have 
> changed now...

Does the u-boot bootloader routine have to do anything other than
generating the extlinux.conf file? That would be enough so that there
is an alternative to grub-install for the qemu use case and for actual
boards, isn't uboot usually written to flash instead of to a MBR?

> Yes, I wrote it. It makes sure it's safe to write to an unclaimed 
> fixed-position section of a drive and then writes to it.
>
> Essentially it does
>
> $ dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8
>         ^^^                                                ^^^
>         depends on board                                   depends on board
>
> but only after making sure that this doesn't clobber anything (payload data 
> on parititons, the partition table etcetc).
>
> It's supposed to be analogous to grub-install, just for u-boot.

Nice!