Re: GRUB and Google Summer of Code

[Michal Suchanek]

On 30 March 2010 20:46, Alex Zanetti de Lima
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue 30 Mar 2010 (14:26) Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko said
>> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>> > 2010/3/29 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
>> >> -Some other hardware which may contain something bootable. We will
>> >> probably have a network subsystem contributed by IBM before Summer so
>> >
>> > Is there some more information about this network  subsystem available?
>>
>> No, I don't know more details myself except that I provided few
>> skeletons for it. When IBM is ready we'll  hear from them. Until
>> thentrying to push would only have negative results
>
> Hi, I'm one of the guys working with grub2 at IBM. That's my first mail to the
> list :)
>
> The default bootloader for PPC machines is still Yaboot (at least on RHEL and
> SLES), and our main goal here at IBM is to contribute code to grub2 to make it
> Yaboot's replacement for PPC systems (specifically IBM POWER5, POWER6 and 
> POWER7
> machines).
>
> The most important feature that we were lacking in grub2, from a PPC
> perspective, was netboot. We ported bootp/tftp support from yaboot to grub2, 
> but
> the implementation was PPC specific, relying upon OFW's obp-tftp package to
> handle all network communication.
>
> We discussed that with Vladimir, who pointed out the following drawbacks:
> 1) Current implementation was BOOTP/TFTP only. No support for other protocols.
> 2) Almost no shared code between architectures.
> 3) 100% dependent on OFW.
>
> We are now working on a network infrastructure that could be shared by all
> platforms, including protocols, device drivers, etc. Gpxe project is a good
> start point, and most of things are being developed based on it.
>
> Chances are that we'll have something working on x86 soon, and then we'll 
> start
> adding support for PPC (access to PCI bus via OFW, VIO, device drivers for 
> some
> very specific cards like ehea, etc).
>

I would be interested in the x86 port and something like telnet and/or
VNC terminal for Grub or at least reading configuration from the
network. I guess it would be possible to test and add additional
layers quite easily once one of the network cards emulated in qemu is
supported.

There is already some crypto imported for password support so adding
enough to have SSL would hopefully not be too difficult.

Thanks

Michal