Re: GRUB2: *BSD and more patch

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sunday 05 September 2004 11:26, Marco Gerards wrote:
>> Here it is in the mailinglist archives:
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2004-03/msg00060.html
>
> Ah, I see. IIRC, I didn't like the patch, because memalign was not 
> implemented. I accept the patch, once someone writes memalign.

There are, as far as I can see, 3 things we can do:

1) Make grub_memalign return GRUB_ERR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED_YET.
   grub_memalign is only used by dl.c, which is not important for the
   utils.  When someone adds module loading support to grub-emu, we
   have to switch to using kern/mm.c anyway.

2) Allocating memory using mmap and managing it with kern/mm.c.  That
   makes it easier to implement module loading.

3) Reserving more memory than required so the alignment can be
   corrected.

And while we are discussing the memory management.  I'd like to add an
option to grub-emu so the memory manager (mm.c or POSIX) can be
chosen.  The mm.c memory manager can be useful to debugging mm.c.  The
POSIX (malloc) memory manager that is available by default will be
useful for debugging for memory leaks with tools like valgrind.

I would prefer solution #1, until we implement more fancy features
(choosing the memory manager and module loading) for grub-emu.  And
even in that case, I think mm.c should be used in grub-emu only and
even then configurable like I described above.

Okuji, do you agree with this or do you prefer another solution?  Or
do you have any other suggestion?  It would not be hard to fix this
and it is required for FreeBSD.  I am willing to work on this.

Thanks,
Marco