Re: my plan for Multiboot 2

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:36:24PM +0530, BVK Chaitanya wrote:
> I don't have much knowledge in multiboot yet, but this case comes to my mind:
> 
> Since GRUB2 is extensible (using modules),

Modules don't really make GRUB extensible.  We don't make any promises about
ABI and it's very impractical to provide extensions as modules.

However, since it's free software and everyone can modify it, it's easy to
extend it at source level.  The grub-extras project does this.  Also, some
basic support in the build system (grep for GRUB_CONTRIB) makes this very
straightforward.

> over time third party
> modules would be developed and they may want to pass their own
> parameters to kernels;  so we should provide some scheme to
> differentiate standard (i.e, multiboot) parameters vs. non-standard
> (i.e, third-party) parameters.

OTOH, with Multiboot spec we need to be more careful.  I'm wary of it becoming
"balkanized" by too many third party extensions.  This doesn't mean we can't
implement extensions which are not in the spec in very specific situations
(e.g. kernel of OpenSolaris is not spec compliant), though.

-- 
Robert Millan

  "Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Gandhi