Re: GRUB vs LinuxBIOS question

[Marco Gerards <mgerards@xs4all.nl>]

Stefan Reinauer <stepan@openbios.org> writes:

Hi,

> * Svante Signell <svante.signell@telia.com> [051229 17:12]:
>> I'm currently reading the mailing list archives on GRUB V2 and LinuxBIOS
>> development. Can somebody please enlighten me on the interfaces between
>> the two development projects. 
>
> I've only been marginally following grub2 development, but the short
> answer is: There are no interfaces at all at the moment. The somewhat
> longer answer is: From the LinuxBIOS perspective, this is not a bad
> thing, as LinuxBIOS tries to keep it's interfaces as small as possible.
> There are only two "transitions" between LinuxBIOS and a "client":
>
>   1) LinuxBIOS comes with an ELF loader that can load any static self
>      contained ELF binary from flash and execute it. This means a single
>      binary containing all grub parts that are needed to boot an OS
>      could be packed together with LinuxBIOS and burned to flash. So
>      far: in theory. 

In that case it would be easy to create a GRUB 2 binary which can be
loaded from LinuxBIOS.  There are similar binaries to load GRUB 2
using PXE or Multiboot (from GRUB Legacy, for example) already.  I
assume it is little work to implement this.

>   2) There is a mechanism to pass information from LinuxBIOS to the
>      outside world called the "LinuxBIOS table". This table contains
>      internal information about the BIOS, such as the possible CMOS 
>      settings, the RAM map of the machine, etc (there's also E820, 
>      PIRQ, MPTABLE and ACPI).
>
> NOTE: LinuxBIOS does not provide any "legacy bios interrupt callbacks",
> so no client can call back into the bios to load stuff from the hard
> disk. This means a client has to provide a driver for this that accesses
> the hardware, not the BIOS. This is why I wrote "in theory" above.

It's possible to add drivers to GRUB 2.  At the moment there are no
drivers there yet, but it surely is possible without too much effort.

> I have been working on taking the grub1 frontend and packing it into FILO 
> a while ago. So you can use a grub user interface easily with LinuxBIOS
> already (with a reduced function set. patches welcome)

It would be nice to have a GRUB 2 payload as well.  I plan to add
drivers in the long term, it's required for several ports.  So it fits
well within the design and direction of the GRUB 2 project, IMO.

>> Is anything tutorial-like written explaining the different
>> functionality of the (Linux)BIOS (CPU, memory, peripheral
>> initialisation, etc) and GRUB (kernel loading, transfer of control
>> to kernel etc).

GRUB 2 has loaders, you can find them in loaders/.  For every OS a
separate loader is required.  I think the sourcecode is quite easy to
understand, but feel free to ask any question you have regarding the
code and its design.

--
Marco