Re: GRUB2 Sparc

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

Bart Grantham <bart-grubdevel@bartgrantham.com> writes:

> - It looks like the Sparc port piggybacks on the powerpc port a bit
> for the open firmware bits.  Is that correct, or am I missing
> something?  If so, I suppose a good goal would be to try to move any
> OF-specific code into it's own module?

The OF code is already shared between both ports, so both ports are
equal if you look at it that way.  We could make a module out of the
OF code some day, but that is not really important now.

> - My (admittedly somewhat hazy) understanding of how an Ultrasparc
> machine boots from disk (any IEEE1275 machine?) is that it reads the
> first sector on the given partition as OF bytecode, which then loads
> up a secondary bootloader or kernel.  Please correct me if I'm wrong
> on this.  Is the GRUB2 project intended to provide a standard bytecode
> sector for this as well, or will platform specific bootsector code
> continue to be used?  And if it's the latter, how does the team
> envision the interface between the boot loader and GRUB2 working?
> Will something like SILO load up GRUB2 like it currently does the
> linux kernel and then GRUB2 takes over from there, leveraging OF for
> keyboard, mouse, display drivers?

I would prefer our own loader to do this.  It would be silly if GRUB
needs another bootloader I guess. :)

--
Marco