Re: [RFC] New object format for grub2

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Pavel Roskin<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello, Marco!
>
> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 16:27 +0200, Marco Gerards wrote:
>
>> There is another problem with this: the maintainance burden.  People
>> know ELF, we have ELF and people will know ELF in the future.
>> Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, GNU/Linux is our main
>> platform.  I do not mind supporting windows or so and we can support
>> it in a sane way, but changing our binary formats for it is one step
>> too far for me...
>
> There is actually a maintenance burden that is caused by the need to
> support the ELF format.  We need to strip some sections from the modules
> for GRUB to process them correctly.
>
What about SELF? (coreboot format) If it's sane I would prefer to
share a format between these 2 projects.
> Support for "secondary" platforms means that the build system should
> recognize of compile tools to convert their native formats to ELF.  It's
> more complex than having one converter for all platforms that is
> completely under our control.
>
> In addition to the problem on the core.img size, we have a problem of
> the size of all the core plus modules.  GRUB already barely fits the
> boot partitions on PowerPC, and it won't fit if yaboot is to be
> preserved.  Soon it will push the limits of a 1.44Mb floppy (without any
> kernels, mind you).  And then there is an issue with writing GRUB on a
> ROM.
>
> I'm not exactly enthusiastic about another major change when we need
> stabilization, but the maintenance argument really doesn't apply here.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
>
>
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>



-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko

Personal git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git