Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:58:54 -0800,
xiongyi wrote:
> I am a potential student applicant for the "Google-summer -of -code"
> program. And I am strongly interested in the GNU Grub project, especially
> for the porting grubs to the EFI-based PC platform idea. But there are few
> messages or information about EFI porting for grub2. So I have some
> questions about this idea.
 
I don't have any experience with EFI, but as far as I know GRUB2
already boots on intel macs and other EFI-based x86 machines. Although
it probably still needs a lot of work, that isn't going to be enough
for a Summer of Code project.

> 1.	Though the source codes of current grub2 have some features about
> EFI, I feel that the building for EFI platform support of grub2 is based on
> an EFI implementation. That means we need an EFI implementation to build the
> source code for EFI of grub2. For example, the building for the elilo is
> based on the gnu-efi project. Is that right?  Or whether the current grub2
> includes an EFI implementation, similar to the gnu-efi project.
 
No, the grub EFI implementation is stand-alone, it doesn't need any
external project.
 
> 2.	The goal of grub2 for efi support is the same as the one of elilo,
> namely an efi OS Loader (also an efi application, for example elilo.efi file
> in the elilo project). Is that right?
 
Yes, the purpose is to load GRUB on EFI hardware so that GRUB can do
all the things it normally does when you load it from standard x86
BIOS.
 
> 3.	There is a real EFI platform in my lab, but I will graduate and
> leave that lab in this June. Accordingly, I have some considerations about
> the development platform and environment. If the efi feature of grub2 is
> only an efi OS loader, whether the EDK open source project can serve as the
> development and debug platform. 

My experience is that while you can develop and test on such things,
real hardware has subtle differences most of the time and you always
need hardware to test whether it really works.

Jeroen Dekkers

Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Tristan Gingold]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 11:49:55PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> At Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:58:54 -0800,
> xiongyi wrote:
[...]
> > 2.	The goal of grub2 for efi support is the same as the one of elilo,
> > namely an efi OS Loader (also an efi application, for example elilo.efi file
> > in the elilo project). Is that right?
>  
> Yes, the purpose is to load GRUB on EFI hardware so that GRUB can do
> all the things it normally does when you load it from standard x86
> BIOS.
Compared to elilo, grub2 can't boot from network.

> > 3.	There is a real EFI platform in my lab, but I will graduate and
> > leave that lab in this June. Accordingly, I have some considerations about
> > the development platform and environment. If the efi feature of grub2 is
> > only an efi OS loader, whether the EDK open source project can serve as the
> > development and debug platform. 
> 
> My experience is that while you can develop and test on such things,
> real hardware has subtle differences most of the time and you always
> need hardware to test whether it really works.
You may use qemu.

Tristan

Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Thursday 22 March 2007 23:49, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > I am a potential student applicant for the "Google-summer -of -code"
> > program. And I am strongly interested in the GNU Grub project, especially
> > for the porting grubs to the EFI-based PC platform idea. But there are
> > few messages or information about EFI porting for grub2. So I have some
> > questions about this idea.
>
> I don't have any experience with EFI, but as far as I know GRUB2
> already boots on intel macs and other EFI-based x86 machines. Although
> it probably still needs a lot of work, that isn't going to be enough
> for a Summer of Code project.

Why not enough? EFI has a significant amount of share in the market, and I see 
nothing bad with working on EFI stuff.

I have already written the status in the wiki:

http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnEFI

In addition, we need Multiboot support on EFI as well.

> My experience is that while you can develop and test on such things,
> real hardware has subtle differences most of the time and you always
> need hardware to test whether it really works.

Definitely. You can use emulators for development, but you need real hardware 
at some point. Note that the payment from SoC is good enough to buy a Mac 
Mini, for example.

Okuji

Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:44:16 +0100,
Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> 
> On Thursday 22 March 2007 23:49, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > > I am a potential student applicant for the "Google-summer -of -code"
> > > program. And I am strongly interested in the GNU Grub project, especially
> > > for the porting grubs to the EFI-based PC platform idea. But there are
> > > few messages or information about EFI porting for grub2. So I have some
> > > questions about this idea.
> >
> > I don't have any experience with EFI, but as far as I know GRUB2
> > already boots on intel macs and other EFI-based x86 machines. Although
> > it probably still needs a lot of work, that isn't going to be enough
> > for a Summer of Code project.
> 
> Why not enough? EFI has a significant amount of share in the market, and I see 
> nothing bad with working on EFI stuff.
> 
> I have already written the status in the wiki:
> 
> http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnEFI
> 
> In addition, we need Multiboot support on EFI as well.

The question is whether it's possible to formulate a project big
enough for Summer of Code and that also has clear goals, given that
the basic implementation of the port is already done?

But I don't know anything about EFI, so if you say that's possible
than it's okay with me.

Jeroen Dekkers

Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Friday 23 March 2007 01:22, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> The question is whether it's possible to formulate a project big
> enough for Summer of Code and that also has clear goals, given that
> the basic implementation of the port is already done?

Good question. I think this task needs to be an assembly of smaller tasks, 
such as Legacy Boot support + CDROM boot support + Video support. Isn't it 
acceptable for SoC to do like this?

Okuji