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Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:09:07 +0200
To: The development of GRUB 2 <grub-devel@gnu.org>
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From: Tristan Gingold <tgingold@free.fr>
Subject: Re: some multiboot2 comments
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On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 02:58:35PM -0500, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> http://grub.enbug.org/MultibootDraft
> 
> I'm looking at implementing this now.
> 
> Module:
> Because of the 'length' field in the tag header, the 'reserved' field
> isn't actually needed. The 'length' field makes every one of these tag
> structures inherently variably sized. Any data added later to this tag
> will be skipped over by the reader.
Yes.
BTW, why not adding a type field for module tag.  The type (which should be
an UUID IMHO) should indicate the type of the module.
One usage could be for Xen.  On Xen you can load 3 modules: the linux kernel,
the linux ramdisk and an ACM configuration.  Xen relies on order and on some
magic checks to find the module type.
The command syntax could be:
module [-type TYPE] file [cmdline]

> Memory Map:
> I'm not sure if we need this. The OS can get this information from
> firmware (e.g. BIOS e820 map or Open Firmware) as easily as we can,
> right? In general, I don't think we should convert firmware information
> into the multiboot structure.
Some platform may need it. On EFI the OS can't get the memmap from EFI because
it is too late.

Tristan.