Re: [RFC] New object format for grub2

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 12:57:43AM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Pavel Roskin<proski@gnu.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> What about SELF? (coreboot format) If it's sane I would prefer to
> share a format between these 2 projects.

I think the most important advantage of using ELF binaries is that it was
widely available & very mature utilities to work with them.

I don't know SELF in detail, but if it prevents us from e.g. running objdump
on our binaries then I think it's a bad idea.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
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  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."