Re: Question about the GNU Grub ideas

[Jeroen Dekkers <jeroen@vrijschrift.org>]

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