Re: USB device not seen by grub

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 04:45:01PM -0600, richardvoigt@gmail.com wrote:
> There are actually quite a lot of devices like this.  Most notebooks
> have broken BIOS that won't load the extension ROM from a PCMCIA slot,
> if grub could do so it would enable booting from a wide variety of
> PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard-to-SCSI/SATA/USB adapters.

PCI ROM processing is a feature we need.  The reason we need this is
not to help proprietary OSes, but so that modules like vbe or biosdisk
can work on other platforms (e.g. coreboot).

The code in those ROMs is often proprietary, but it is external to the
motherboard.  This is important, because GRUB may act as the primary
firmware for PC-class motherboards (when combined with coreboot).  In
this kind of setup, GRUB itself can't support external cards using its
own drivers and must rely on the PCI ROM ones.  Therefore this interaction
is always needed.

Also, some platforms like EFI insist on acting as a wrapper between these
PCI ROM drivers and the bootloader.  Since this wrapper is completely useless
and just adding overhead, we might as well skip it.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."