Re: Which utilities

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Sunday 30 July 2006 17:12, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> Hi!  I'm trying to decide which utilities to build for hppa-ipl.  Is
> there a good place to find documentation on all of:
>
> grub-mkimage, grub-setup, grub-emu, grub-mkdevicemap, grub-probefs
>
> Most of these don't even have comments at the top of the .c file saying
> what they're for. =)

Asking documentation is a kind of joke at the moment.

In principle, what you need are what you expect the user wants to use. The 
most important utility is grub-install. grub-emu is not obligatory, because 
it is meant only for developers. Other tools are usually helpers for 
grub-install.

I describe the tools on i386-pc here:

grub-install - installs GRUB

grub-mkimage - creates a core image file, called from grub-install

grub-setup - sets up GRUB to be booted by embedding it into a boot sector

grub-mkdevicemap - creates a device map automatically

grub-probefs - guesses what filesystem module should be included in a core 
image

On i386-efi, grub-install does not exist. This is because I haven't 
reverse-engineered "bless" yet. So only grub-setup is implemented, and the 
user needs to install GRUB "manually".

On powerpc-ieee1275, only grub-mkimage is required for grub-install, because 
grub-install uses some other utilities developed by external projects. But 
Hollis should know better than me about this.

Okuji