Re: partition map reorganization

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org> writes:

> I'm working on supporting more than one partition map per
> architecture. Currently, x86 builds use disk/i386/pc/partition.c, and
> PPC builds use disk/powerpc/ieee1275/partition.c. Both provide
> identically-named functions for architecture-neutral code
> (e.g. grub_partition_iterate). Additionally, Apple partition code
> deals with things it shouldn't (e.g. dos_type), so we can see that
> some abstraction is needed here.

After a long time of not being active, I finally found some time again
to work on GRUB.  Just to keep you all up-to-date, I am going to work
on this multiple partition map feature and I have talked with Hollis
about it.

What I am planning to do is at first make the partition system work
more or less like the filesystem modules.  So the type of partition
map can be probed and the user can configure which kind of partition
maps will be supported (using modules).

My current goal is getting GRUB 2 to work on the PegasosII.  The
pegasos has RDB (amiga style) partition maps.  The BriQ (a machine
Hollis has) has PC style partition maps.  So all 3 partition map types
should be supported by GRUB 2.  This will make further ports easier as
well.

So basically, I will check in some patches next days to make GRUB 2
work smoothly on the PegasosII.  After that I will send in a patch to
support multiple partition maps.  When that is in I will send in a
patch to add RDB support (which is finished already).

After that I will work a bit more on the PPC port, especially on
PegasosII specific things.  The VGA/VESA stuff I planned to do has to
wait because my test/development PC is still broken. :/

This is my priority list for the moment (in order in which I will work
on this):

- Fixing bugs in the PPC port.
- Modular partition maps.
- Implement RDB support.
- Implement Amiga FFS support.
- Write longjmp, etc for the PPC.
- Implement the relocator for the PPC (I need module support in
  grub-emu to make this easy for me to implement).
- A chainloader.
- Have another look at the terminal.

This will keep me busy for quite a while, perhaps I will do some
filesystem and PC work in the meanwhile.  If someone wants to help
with the PPC port, you can work on implementing longjmp and the
relocator.  The first requires knowledge about assembler and the
second is what I described above.

Hopefully it is clear what I am going to do and I hope people are
willing to help me with the assembler stuff and the relocator. :)

Thanks,
Marco