Re: [RFC] New object format for grub2

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

Hello, Marco!

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 16:27 +0200, Marco Gerards wrote:

> There is another problem with this: the maintainance burden.  People
> know ELF, we have ELF and people will know ELF in the future.
> Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, GNU/Linux is our main
> platform.  I do not mind supporting windows or so and we can support
> it in a sane way, but changing our binary formats for it is one step
> too far for me...

There is actually a maintenance burden that is caused by the need to
support the ELF format.  We need to strip some sections from the modules
for GRUB to process them correctly.

Support for "secondary" platforms means that the build system should
recognize of compile tools to convert their native formats to ELF.  It's
more complex than having one converter for all platforms that is
completely under our control.

In addition to the problem on the core.img size, we have a problem of
the size of all the core plus modules.  GRUB already barely fits the
boot partitions on PowerPC, and it won't fit if yaboot is to be
preserved.  Soon it will push the limits of a 1.44Mb floppy (without any
kernels, mind you).  And then there is an issue with writing GRUB on a
ROM.

I'm not exactly enthusiastic about another major change when we need
stabilization, but the maintenance argument really doesn't apply here.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin